Nasa had marked a quarter of a century of space flight: 25 years, and the launch of the Challenger on 28 January 1986, was the 25th Space Shuttle mission. It’s all there in the name – a shuttle is the bus you get on to go to the airport or get to the car park; it’s so reliable and sturdy its mechanics barely require thought or attention.
Yet the world’s first reusable spacecraft remains the most complex flying machine ever built and was the culmination of a space programme of almost unimaginable intricacy and (literally) astronomical cost (the final mission of the Space Shuttle programme completed in 2011 when Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center). “We choose to go to the Moon,” President John F Kennedy said in 1962 – the goal to accomplish that feat before the decade was out became a furious race after his assassination and as the USSR appeared to rocket ahead in space exploration. At the height of the Apollo programme, which ran from 1961-72, 400,000 men and women worked for Nasa: as Adam Higginbotham notes in a striking image, “The technology and materials of the lunar lander were so exotic that it cost fifteen times its weight in gold.”
But the war in Vietnam and the economic contractions of the 1970s meant that in the years after Apollo, Nasa’s budget was drastically cut: yet the agency still had to prove itself. The Shuttle appeared to the layman’s eye a perfect solution to the dilemmas of these new times. It would make space flight routine, a workhorse servicing satellites and space stations – and unbeknownst to almost everyone, facilitating a “black” or secret programme of military reconnaissance to justify its funding. When the programme was plagued by cost overruns in 1978 and nearly axed by President Jimmy Carter as a result, only the intervention of the then defense secretary Harold Brown that kept it running: “As a result the shuttle emerged from the budget crisis cemented as a key asset in Pentagon plans for conducting spy missions from orbit,” Higginbotham writes.
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space is likely the definitive account of what happened in the lead-up to that freezing January morning at Cape Canaveral – icicles garlanding the tower where Challenger stood primed to launch – and its aftermath, when 73 seconds into its flight the craft exploded, killing Commander Francis R Scobee, Pilot Michael J Smith, mission specialists Ronald E McNair, Ellison S Onizuka and Judith A Resnik, along with payload specialists Christa McAuliffe and Gregory B Jarvis.
It wasn’t just the worst disaster Nasa had ever suffered, it was also exceptionally personal for millions of people in the United States and indeed across the world. McAuliffe, 37, was a schoolteacher from New Hampshire who had been chosen from more than 11,000 applicants to be the first “average citizen in space”. “Not only had she embodied the hopes of all those adults who believed, however remotely, that her journey was bringing the Walter Mitty fantasy of citizen spaceflight within their grasp. More than anything else, the poignant public death of the world’s first Everyman astronaut made the loss of Challenger a shared tragedy, an instant-replay televised martyrdom in which everyone watching played a part.”
Higginbotham’s last book was an account of a disaster – as it happens, one that also took place in 1986. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster – a New York Times’s best book of 2019 and winner of the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction – was a similarly gripping and nuanced account of serial failure. Broadly speaking, the causes of the Challenger’s destruction are known and were discovered by the Rogers Commission which investigated the disaster and presented its findings to President Ronald Reagan in June 1986. The severe cold in Florida that morning reduced the resiliency of the rubber “O-rings” (think of a washer in a tap) that sealed the joint between the lower segments of the right-hand solid rocket booster. Hot gas escaped from the booster at launch leading to a cascade of calamity. (During the televised hearing, Richard Feynman – the charismatic Nobel laureate in physics who had been seconded to the committee – put a section of the O-ring material in a Styrofoam cup of ice water to demonstrate, simply and horrifyingly, its lack of elasticity.) The voice-recorder data from the crew cabin is haunting. “Roger, go at throttle up,” Scobee says, one minute ten seconds after launch. Three seconds later Smith says “Uh-oh” and after that – nothing, as the craft broke apart and tumbled in pieces down into the ocean. As Higginbotham recounts, the crew cabin survived intact for the duration of the two-and-a-half-minute fall, and there were indications that the crew were alive during that terrible descent.
Higginbotham’s book is nearly 600 pages long, and includes detailed notes that are worth turning to as one reads; they do not simply offer references but additional glosses on this compelling and dreadful tale. Yes, we know how this awful story ends: but Higginbotham builds suspense in contrasting knowledge with ignorance; in showing how men and women tried to do their best for the grand dream of space flight and were too often thwarted. In meticulous detail he lays out how Nasa struggled to adjust its culture from one with limitless access to manpower and resources to one that had to fight for means and compromise. When the Nasa administrator Thomas Paine proposed a “space plane” to Richard Nixon’s government, there was little love in Congress for such ambition. A budget of $14bn was cut to just $5.5bn, “far too little money to create an experimental machine that would require the research and development of so much untried technology”. Yet the agency agreed to the offer. “It was the first of many fatal compromises,” Higginbotham writes.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is nothing new: Nasa has long contracted private companies to build its equipment. North American Aviation built the Apollo command and service modules, Grumman the lunar modules. The solid rocket contractor for the Shuttle programme was Morton Thiokol, based in Utah, and as soon as this tale of industrial manufacture begins, the reader despairs at the relentless barrage of risks taken to save money (delicate rockets shipped long distances in segments rather than built on site), the haste to get things done and a stunning willed blindness to danger. This is where Higginbotham’s deep research pays dividends: in demonstrating a culture of complacency. You don’t have to know much about engineering to gasp when you read a sentence like this: “In the absence of an escape system to rescue the astronauts during the boosters’ flight, Nasa managers had to reduce the risk of such a calamity as far as possible; the rockets would simply have to work perfectly every time.” Nothing – nothing – works perfectly every time.
The tragic heroes of this story are those who tried, over and over again, to raise their voices to warn – but were silenced and ignored. Roger Boisjoly, senior scientist in structural mechanics at Thiokol, was well aware of the problem with the O-rings. Yet when he reported his findings to his manager he was told “to keep the data to himself; it would be too damaging to the company if anyone at Nasa learned what they had found”. Head to YouTube to watch CBS report the immediate aftermath of the disaster and listen to Jesse Moore, head of the Shuttle programme at Nasa, assert that “there was absolutely no pressure to get this particular launch off. We have always maintained that flight safety is our top priority.” Again: nothing – nothing – could have been further from the truth.
Higginbotham brings a large cast of characters – astronauts, engineers, administrators – to life in building his cautionary tale. It’s hard to feel reassured that lessons have been learned since the Challenger disaster – and not just within Nasa. In 2003, Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry, killing all seven astronauts aboard; the investigation into that catastrophe “concluded that many of the lessons of the Challenger disaster had gone unheeded”. To the millions who watched the disaster unfold on live TV, “the end of Challenger seemed sudden, remote, and inexplicable” – but as Higginbotham so bracingly proves, it was not.
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
Adam Higginbotham
Viking, 576pp, £25
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
Content from our partners
Related
