I started writing about this book last summer when it was next up on my book group’s reading list. It was so fat–did I want to read such a thick, serious book in the summer? It turns out I did because Higginbotham’s an excellent narrative nonfiction writer. Challenger recalls all those years of excitement about the space program that I remember so well. The last third, about the Challenger disaster, is very, very sad. It’s so hard to read about those seven astronauts who lost their lives. There was so much excitement about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher in space; it was devastating to lose her. There’s a middle school named after her in Jackson, NJ; I was there about fifteen years ago and I cried when I saw the displays in the lobby. I can’t forget what she said: “I touch the future. I teach.”
Higginbotham begins in the early 1960s when President Kennedy committed the U.S. to a program of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Competition ramped up after the 1956 launch of the Russian orbiter Sputnik galvanized NASA and changed educational curricula to focus on science in a more structured way. I remember how little science there was when I was in elementary school. In the early 1960s, JFK challenged NASA to put a man on the moon.
This book, of course, focuses on the Space Shuttle program, which was active from 1981 to 2011. It was an effort to make space travel and experiments frequent and safely repeatable with reusable low-Earth orbit spacecraft. In the early 1980s, we became familiar with the sight of those shuttles on TV news reports, lifting off and returning. It seemed like the problems of space flight were solved.
When the Challenger exploded on our TV screens that morning in 1986, we were reminded in the most horrific way that these flights were hardly routine. Higginbotham writes about the technical challenges of launching those shuttles, the complicated and delicate components that had to work flawlessly each time. For the Challenger flight, many of the engineers had serious reservations and the flight was delayed several times. By January 28th, the federal government was pressuring NASA to go ahead, to save the embarrassment of another postponement. The weather was wrong and there were serious doubts about how the critical O-ring seals would perform in the cold. The astronauts were, of course, shielded from these discussions, and at the last minute, the engineers from Morton Thiokol, the manufacturers of the solid rocket boosters, were intimidated and threatened into giving a go-ahead.
In the aftermath of that disaster, there were whistleblowers and cover-ups; it’s a sad and difficult story to read. People lost their jobs, others lived with guilt. While it’s amazing how many successful space missions we had, it’s important to remember that it was hubris that doomed this mission.
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