New York: Avid Reader Press, 2024
570 pp. $35 (hardcover)
None of the millions of people who witnessed the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, will ever forget the wave of shock and grief that swept over the United States, and the world, on that day. When the shuttle exploded a little more than a minute into its flight—killing seven astronauts, including New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe, scheduled to become the first “regular person in space”—it was more than just a deadly accident; it was, as President Ronald Reagan said in a televised address that night, a pain that struck “to the core.”1
In his new fascinating and moving study of the catastrophe, journalist Adam Higginbotham argues that one reason it caused such special anguish was “the almost ideal diversity of the Challenger crew—‘one of everything’”—which made it easier for Americans to identify with those who perished (373). But a more important reason was that the astronauts—hardworking heroes on the frontiers of discovery—had come to symbolize Americans’ vision of their ideal selves: They embodied bravery, dedication, and optimism. Now they had been taken, in a sudden and horrific flash—the stunning failure of what had come to seem like a safe, even routine procedure. . . .
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Endnotes
1. Mary E. Stuckey, Slipping the Surly Bonds: Reagan’s Challenger Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 3.
2. Richard P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Norton, 1988), 164.
3. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, 220.
4. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, 237.
5. Stuckey, Slipping the Surly Bonds, 111.
