Challenger

Starred review from March 18, 2024
In this gripping history, bestseller Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl) recaps the Jan. 28, 1986, explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger soon after liftoff, killing all seven crew members, and the tragedy’s roots in a culture of negligence and recklessness at NASA. He explores the flaws that plagued the fiendishly complex shuttle design, focusing on the rubber O-rings used to seal joints in the shuttle’s twin solid rocket boosters to prevent catastrophic leaks of hot gas during lift-off. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the rockets’ manufacturer, noticed worrisome signs that the O-rings could fail, especially in cold weather—like the sub-freezing temperatures at Cape Canaveral on the day of the launch. Higginbotham narrates the tense conference at which Morton Thiokol’s engineers pleaded with NASA to postpone the launch, only to have NASA officials, determined to quicken the pace of launches for budgetary reasons, pressure them into green-lighting it. Higginbotham’s colorful narrative contrasts the eager idealism of Challenger’s crew, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, with the arrogance of NASA honchos who dismissed warnings and casually gambled with the astronauts’ lives. His account of the engineering issues is lucid and meticulous, and his evocative prose conveys both the extraordinary achievement of rocket scientists in harnessing colossal energies with delicate mechanisms and the sudden cataclysms that erupt when the machinery fails. The result is a beguiling saga of the peril and promise of spaceflight.

May 1, 2024
A searching history of a disaster-laden effort to build and launch a space shuttle. Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl, begins in 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger experienced what a controller dispassionately called "obviously a major malfunction," exploding with no survivors. He then looks backward at a fraught moment in earlier NASA history, when a fire in the inaugural Apollo capsule killed the three astronauts aboard, "the most lethal accident in the short history of the US space program." Mission commander Gus Grissom had noted shoddy construction beforehand, and the rush to get the spacecraft into space before the Russians could claim the Moon led to deadly shortcuts. As the author capably chronicles, the space shuttle program began with major obstacles--not just the technical hurdles of building a reusable shuttle capable of withstanding the rigors of launch and reentry, but also "a further new parameter, one of which NASA had no existing experience: a limited budget." That tight budget, imposed by Nixon-era austerity measures reducing a $14 billion request to just $5.5 billion, "the first of many fatal compromises," led to shortcuts in construction that NASA leaders overlooked even as contractors voiced worries about them. Famous scenes from the Challenger postmortem are seared in memory, including when physicist Richard Feynman plunged a rubber O-ring into ice water to show its instability in cold temperatures. Unlike Apollo, the space shuttle program was effectively terminated, if slowly, after a second shuttle, Columbia, exploded, with NASA engineers and administrators having ignored "signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture of repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible." Higginbotham's book is without Tom Wolfe's flash, but it's a worthy bookend to The Right Stuff--albeit marred by the wrong stuff--all the same. A deeply researched, fluently written study in miscommunication, hubris, and technological overreach.

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May 1, 2024
Space flight is one of the greatest high risk, high reward human endeavors ever attempted. In his precise account of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Higginbotham, Carnegie Medal-winner for Midnight in Chernobyl (2019), delves into the definition of acceptable risk and assesses accountability. A previous catastrophe, the 1967 launch-pad fire of Apollo 1 that took three lives, had cast a shadow over NASA's achievements. On the very cold Florida morning of January 28, 1986, Challenger's lift-off marked the twenty-fifth NASA space shuttle mission. After only 73 seconds of flight, an enlarging fireball abruptly replaced the spacecraft as debris plummeted into the ocean. The crew of seven (including two civilians, teacher Christa McAuliffe and engineer Greg Jarvis) perished. Higginbotham's chronicle of the people and events associated with America's Space Transportation System is imposing with profuse (bordering on excessive) details. Battered by budget cuts and bureaucracy, pummeled by political pressure and promises of too many scheduled flights, NASA buckled. (In 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry, also killing seven.) Following the Challenger calamity, a presidential commission's investigation reported human error and mismanagement along with technical failure (malfunction of a pressure seal in a solid rocket booster). But hubris also contributed. Higginbotham's comprehensive and affecting recounting and explanation illuminates a tragedy that was entirely preventable.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The dramatic subject and best-selling, award-winning Higginbotham's sterling reputation will lure nonfiction fans.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.