Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
By Timothy Sandefur
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.
In fact, one of the main reasons the Space Shuttle program existed was to make space travel a regular occurrence: NASA had touted its shuttles as akin to commercial airliners, and by 1986 Americans were so used to launches that the agency fashioned its plan to carry “ordinary people” into space as a way of reinvigorating public interest. But the shuttles never even approached the level of safety that NASA advertised. They were the “most complicated machines in history” but were never launch-tested before the first one, Columbia, took off in April 1981, carrying two nervous astronauts and a suite of hardware that in some ways was jury-rigged at the last minute (47).
Columbia landed successfully two days later and launched again in November, proving the shuttle to be what NASA had promised: the first reusable spacecraft. But after that second mission, when technicians examined the used solid rocket boosters—150-foot-tall mega-missiles strapped to the shuttle’s sides, then the most powerful rockets ever flown—they found something disconcerting. The fireproof gaskets that helped join segments of the rockets had been badly damaged. By failing to hold back the tremendous forces unleashed upon ignition, these faulty O-rings had let white-hot gases burn through a seam between the segments, risking the safety of the ship.
Engineers knew the boosters were the shuttle’s Achilles heel: solid-fuel rockets can’t be turned off once ignited, and it’s impossible to control their thrusting power. Yet NASA bureaucrats downplayed the risk for fear Congress might restrict funding for the space program if it knew the truth.
When, in 1982, an independent auditor predicted that the boosters were so dangerous that they would fail catastrophically—killing the crew and destroying the spacecraft—on average about once every twenty or thirty launches, NASA officials pressured the auditors to change their prediction to once every thousand launches. Then they decided that was still too pessimistic and persuaded the analysts to change the number again, this time to once every ten thousand launches. “If these estimates proved accurate,” writes Higginbotham, “it would allow NASA to fly a new shuttle mission once a week for a hundred years before witnessing a disaster” (169). Amazingly, NASA leaders continued to exaggerate the safety estimates; by 1986 they were claiming the shuttle’s failure rate was 1/100,000 (421).
The boosters weren’t the shuttle’s only weak point. The heat shield on the orbiter’s belly, designed to withstand the blazing temperatures experienced during landing, was a technological marvel, but it was made up of 24,300 tiles, each one of which was unique and had to be hand-installed. They had to be attached just right: not too far apart—that would allow heat to penetrate—but not too close together, because the fragile coating that covered the tiles could crack if they rubbed against each other. (Indeed, in 2003, damage to the tiles caused Columbia to break up on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts.)
Tiles often fell off. Engines and brakes wore out rapidly. And shortages of parts sometimes forced engineers to remove equipment from one shuttle to install in another in time for launch. Shuttle missions, therefore, often were exercises in improvisation, ingenuity, and downright heroism, rather than the routine space-commuting NASA publicly promised. Higginbotham relates some of these incidents in thrilling, even hair-raising detail. On July 29, 1985—just weeks after a close call with the shuttle Discovery, when the crew had to abort launch just three seconds before takeoff, causing a fire that could have killed them all—Challenger lifted off, only to have one of its three central engines fail about six minutes into flight. By then, Challenger was high enough that it could “abort to orbit,” meaning it could reach space despite the failure. That was a risky procedure but a feasible one. Two minutes later, however, another alarm signaled a second engine shutdown. With two engines disabled, the crew’s only hope would be an emergency landing in Spain—a desperate effort that they probably would not survive. Fortunately, a cool-headed engineer at Mission Control named Jenny Howard realized in an instant that the second engine was actually fine: The sensor was just malfunctioning. With no time to spare, she instructed the crew to override the sensor and keep heading upward, likely saving their lives.
Howard’s rational focus on the facts was in the best tradition of the space program, and it was a quality shared by a rocket engineer named Roger Boisjoly, an employee of Morton Thiokol, the company that built the boosters. In January 1985, after Discovery launched during a record-breaking cold snap, Boisjoly was part of the team that inspected the recovered booster rockets, only to find the worst evidence of O-ring failure yet seen. Theorizing that cold weather caused them to lose the elasticity they needed to resist the rocket’s flames, Boisjoly wrote a series of memos to his managers warning of the risk this posed. But Thiokol’s leaders, unpersuaded, relegated him to a “task force” to study the problem—which he soon discovered had no real authority to do anything about it.
A year later, when he learned that Challenger was going to launch in even colder weather—so cold that ice formed on the rocket, and pipes broke in the launch facilities—Boisjoly raised the alarm again. This time, he and several of his fellow engineers who had come to share his concerns persuaded Thiokol managers to convene a conference call with NASA on the night before the launch. The engineers begged the government to postpone takeoff. Moved by their arguments, two Thiokol vice presidents told NASA’s rocket manager, Larry Mulloy, that the boosters weren’t rated for such cold and that launching would risk the astronauts’ lives.
What happened next was a moment worthy of a Hollywood drama.
Mulloy was silent for a moment, and then began to browbeat them: “My god, Thiokol,” he cried, “when do you expect me to launch—next April?” (327).
Faced with such irritation from their leading customer, the company’s leaders caved. Having only minutes earlier urged postponement, they told Mulloy, “we recommend launch” (330).
Crestfallen, Boisjoly and his colleagues could do nothing but watch their worst fears come true the next morning on live television.
Boisjoly became a minor celebrity during the investigation that followed, when he testified before the presidential commission charged with learning the explosion’s cause. Serving on that commission was the Nobel prize-winning physics professor Richard Feynman, who memorably demonstrated the problem with the O-rings during a televised hearing when he stuck a piece of the ring into a glass of ice water, then pulled it out and showed that it had lost its flexibility, rendering it useless as a sealant against the extraordinary forces of a rocket motor. When the commission was told of the last-minute conference call between NASA and Thiokol, Feynman was stunned.
“Mr. Boisjoly,” he asked, “were you in agreement . . . that it was OK to fly?”
“No, I was not,” he replied (396).
“So,” Feynman later wrote, “the [man who was] mentioned right away as being the best seal expert . . . said no.”2
Yet the decision to launch was made anyway.
Feynman explored the reasons for this in his memoir What Do You Care What Other People Think?, in which he discussed the lessons that the Challenger disaster dramatized about the confusion and misjudgment endemic to bureaucracies.
Feynman’s first lesson was that manipulating numbers can create unforeseen dangers: When he tried to find out who had originated the claim that the risk of losing a shuttle was 1 in 100,000, he learned that the number essentially had been made up. It’s understandable that such an assessment would be largely guesswork—the risks of flying something as complicated as the shuttle cannot be accurately quantified—but once the politically concocted 1/1,000 number began circulating, it took on a life of its own, gradually stretching to 1/100,000 and becoming generally accepted “common sense.” That, in turn, fostered an exaggerated feeling of security, which encouraged greater risk-taking, thus proving more dangerous than if people had simply admitted that nobody had calculated the danger.
The second lesson concerned what management experts now call “complacency creep”—in Feynman’s words, it occurs when a “risk taken before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again.”3 People can gradually become accustomed to risks, which can fool them into reducing their safety standards without realizing it. As Higginbotham observes, in describing the late-night call between Thiokol and NASA,
in the past, if a contractor’s data about the state of flight hardware had been inconclusive, the default position was not to fly: they were expected to prove that their equipment and components constituted an acceptable risk before launch. Now, it seemed, [NASA administrator] Mulloy was asking Boisjoly to prove the opposite—to show him the data that proved conclusively that it was not safe to launch. (326)
By subtly shifting the burden of proof to Boisjoly and his allies—perhaps not even recognizing that they were doing so—Mulloy and other NASA officials in that last-minute meeting were losing track of crucial safety parameters and tolerating risks beyond what the shuttle’s designers ever contemplated.
But Feynman’s third lesson was the most important. In “an attempt to assure the government of NASA’s perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds,” he wrote, the agency had lost focus on the “world of reality.” Feeling pressure to launch more often than the program’s safety margins really allowed, the agency had cut corners. And that was the worst transgression, Feynman wrote: “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”4 Whether through oversight, cowardice, or political motivation, the officials responsible for Challenger and its crew crossed the line that reality draws between the possible and impossible—with devastating consequences.
Higginbotham charts the slow sequence of misjudgments that led to the disaster with the accuracy of a devoted journalist and the dramatic flair of a suspense novelist. But his book is neither doleful nor vindictive. On the contrary, it reveals, in poignant and often uplifting detail, how special the men and women of the shuttle program were, particularly those who lost their lives on that terrible day. There was McAuliffe—the cheerful thirty-seven-year-old history teacher who planned to conduct televised lessons for children on Earth—and Michael Smith, a Vietnam veteran who had been flying planes longer than he could drive. Greg Jarvis was an electronics engineer who built satellites and loved adventure; Ellison Onizuka, an air force pilot who grew up on a Hawaii coffee farm and became the first Asian astronaut; and Judith Resnik, a biomedical engineer and electronics expert who became the second American woman in space at the age of twenty-eight. Ronald McNair, born in segregated South Carolina—his family so poor their house had no running water—grew up picking tobacco and eventually earned a PhD in physics before becoming the second black American in space. Finally, Dick Scobee, Challenger’s commander, was an air force test pilot who told his wife he wanted to go to space despite the risks because “I could die out here on this interstate highway in a traffic accident, and my life would have been wasted, or I could make a difference for my country and fly” (80).
Scobee treasured a silver tankard given to him one Christmas by a NASA administrator, engraved with a line from a novel that President Reagan quoted in the speech with which he unveiled the first shuttle: “Where did we get such men?” (268). To read Higginbotham’s account of the Challenger heroes is to be overwhelmed by the same sense of awe and astonishment.
The story of Challenger is a story of foolhardiness and brilliance, of spinelessness and heroism. Most of all, it’s the story of courageous and idealistic people who devoted themselves to a dream. “Man will continue his conquest of space,” said President Reagan at the crew’s memorial service. “To reach out for new goals and ever greater achievements—that is the way we shall commemorate our seven Challenger heroes.”5