Strangest fact
Several of the people in the viral videos really do share an astronaut's exact name and look a little like an aged-up photo of them. That sounds too neat to be chance, but in a country of more than 300 million people many names are shared (Michael Smith is among the most common), photos can be picked to match, and two of the 'lookalikes' are the astronauts' own brothers, who look alike for the ordinary reason that they are family.
Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, on live television. The seven crew members were commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, mission specialists Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair and Ellison S. Onizuka, and payload specialists Gregory B. Jarvis and the teacher S. Christa McAuliffe. If you remember 'killed astronauts in the 90s', the event you are probably thinking of is this one. No American crew was lost in the 1990s; the next loss was Columbia in 2003.
From about 2015, posts and videos began claiming the disaster was staged and that most of the crew were living openly under their own names. The best-known version pairs each astronaut with a living person who shares a name and looks somewhat like an older version of them: a Yale Law School professor named Judith Resnik, a business owner named Richard Scobee, a retired university professor named Michael J. Smith, and a lawyer named Sharon McAuliffe. Videos also showed Ronald McNair's brother Carl McNair and Ellison Onizuka's brother Claude Onizuka, and said the astronauts had simply changed their names. Gregory Jarvis was usually left out.
Fact-checkers at Snopes (2015), PolitiFact, Lead Stories (2022) and Full Fact compared the records. The astronaut Judith Resnik earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1977 and joined NASA in 1978, while the law professor Judith Resnik began lecturing at Yale Law School in 1977 and built a continuous, documented legal career. The pilot Michael Smith graduated from the Naval Academy in 1967 and flew in Vietnam, while the professor with the same name followed a separate academic path. The two brothers are the astronauts' real brothers, which is why they resemble them; Lead Stories noted that Carl McNair has a gap between his front teeth that Ronald McNair did not.
The physical record is clear. Arlington National Cemetery notes that it took nearly two months to recover the crew's remains from the ocean floor, and NASA's July 28, 1986 report by Dr. Joseph Kerwin found that the final impact with the ocean, at about 207 miles per hour, was far beyond what the crew compartment or the crew could survive. The cemetery records that the commingled cremated remains of the seven astronauts were buried there on May 20, 1986, in Section 46, and that Scobee and Smith also have individual graves. In 2022 NASA's chief historian, Brian Odom, told PolitiFact that the accident did occur on January 28, 1986, causing the deaths of the crew.