What We Didn’t Learn From a Space Shuttle Disaster

Rachel Slade

UNITED NATIONS: My entry into the world was eclipsed, several days before I was born, by the story of four Americans who had temporarily left theirs to walk on the moon. Sixteen years later, I stood in a classroom of fellow space age kids around a bulky cathode-ray tube TV wheeled in on an A/V cart to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Looking soft and white, the spacecraft (officially called an orbiter) rode on the back of a 10-story-tall tank full of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. On either side of the tank were two solid rocket boosters basically giant metal tubes packed with a rubbery explosive that, once lit, burned until the fuel ran out, thrusting the orbiter out of gravity’s grip.

By January 1986, two dozen shuttle missions had taken place with minimal public interest which was a problem for NASA. Lack of interest meant diminishing funds from an indifferent Congress, and you can’t jettison humans safely into space without money.

So NASA cooked up a public relations gambit to build excitement for its next mission. In the days and months leading up to Challenger’s 25th launch, the nation was fed a constant news diet about Christa McAuliffe, the first non-astronaut (and grade-school teacher) to ride into space. Hence, the TV on the cart in the school library.

Most schoolchildren in the United States, like me, were officially skipping lessons to watch that launch. As Adam Higginbotham recounts in “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” a mere 73 seconds after liftoff, the 526,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen exploded, instantly blowing apart the orbiter. The reinforced cockpit carrying the seven crew members traced a two-minute arc over the Atlantic Ocean before smashing apart upon hitting the surface of the water.

Then came the near-constant post-accident replay of that indelible explosion in the clear blue Florida sky a Reagan-era snuff film.

We took comfort in the thought that the astronauts died instantly. We were wrong. Recorded audio captured from a painstakingly reconstructed magnetic tape of the shuttle’s black box revealed that at least one astronaut, Mike Smith, had survived the entire journey, counting down the seconds to certain death.

Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the dozens of major and minor players involved in NASA’s many successful, and occasionally catastrophic, space missions.

But this is not a book that revels in triumph and courage. Its focus is on the relentless string of snafus and mind-boggling hubris that plagued these missions from the start. In spite of startling incompetence, NASA achieved unimaginable technical feats — but the cost was great. The failures, however occasional, ended in death and ruined lives.

Higginbotham’s book opens with the tragedy of Apollo 1, which burned up on the launchpad during its first launch in 1967, asphyxiating all three astronauts as they desperately tried to unbolt the pod door to escape the flames. The culprits were already well known to NASA: The cabin was a pure pressurized oxygen environment laced with thick bundles of poorly installed electrical wires and combustible material, including 5,000 square inches of flammable Velcro that the crew had installed to secure things; the faulty hatch door was nearly impossible to open and close. Engineers had warned NASA of these issues; their concerns were considered and dismissed. But the doomed astronauts were all too aware of the risks.

The causes of the Challenger tragedy, 19 years afterward, were eerily similar. The mission depended on solid-state rockets to propel the shuttle into space — an economically driven, dangerous decision. The rocket was built in Utah in segments for easier transport, then fitted together on-site at Cape Canaveral with rubber gaskets designed to seal the joints.

Each time the used rockets returned to earth following a mission, a forensic team would analyze the performance of the giant rubber gaskets because, if those connections failed, burning fuel would quickly escape, turning a controlled burn in a chamber into a fireball that could ignite the liquid oxygen/hydrogen bomb to which the orbiter was attached. And on many occasions, engineers working for Morton Thiokol were alarmed by what they saw: evidence that the 12-foot-diameter rubber rings weren’t working as designed. It was a bad joint, bound to fail, especially in colder temperatures.

One Thiokol engineer, Roger Boisjoly, spent years obsessing over a fix for the problem, but his recommendations went unheeded. The verdict came down from on high: It was too expensive, and too time-consuming, to repair the joint. Boisjoly knew it was only a matter of time before the faulty joint caught up with the shuttle program. As the renowned physicist Richard Feynman wrote after the Challenger investigation: “When playing Russian roulette, the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.”

For cynical Americans, disaster buffs and engineers, “Challenger” will be a quick, devastating read. In Higginbotham’s deft hands, the human element — sometimes heroic, sometimes cloaked in doublespeak and bluster shines through the many technical aspects of this story, a constant reminder that every decision was made by people weighing risks versus expediency, their minds distorted by power, money, politics and yes-men. It’s a universal story that transcends time, from Napoleon’s decision to attack Russia to the recent Boeing 737 Max debacle.