Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

by Adam Higginbotham

The following year, Gil Scott-Heron expressed the way many Black Americans felt, with scornful irony, in his poem “Whitey on the Moon”: Was all that money I made las’ year (for Whitey on the moon?) How come there ain’t no money here? (Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon) Y’know, I jus’ ’bout had my fill (of Whitey on the moon.)

Six months later, on the afternoon of December 8, Lawrence was flying a training mission with a student pilot in a modified F-104 Starfighter when the aircraft crashed on approach to the runway at Edwards. The landing gear collapsed, the cockpit canopy shattered, and the aircraft scraped along the runway for two hundred feet before bouncing briefly into the air and smashing into the ground a second, and final, time. At the moment Lawrence pulled the handle to eject, the plane had begun to roll over, and the pilot’s rocket-powered seat fired him horizontally across the desert floor, likely killing him instantly.

A blunt New Yorker born in the Bronx, Frosch had taken the NASA job almost by accident: he and his family spent their summers in a house on Cape Cod next door to Frank Press, Carter’s science adviser, who one day casually suggested that Frosch might like to join the government as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. But when Frosch arrived in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1977 as part of the group of new appointees meeting at the White House, Press took him aside and explained that the NOAA job was no longer available; he’d had to give it to Richard Frank, a major contributor to the new President’s election campaign. “He’s going to be running NOAA; end of story,” Press said. “Would you mind NASA?”

But at the bottom of the right-hand booster, near the aft field joint, the reading was just 8 degrees—an astonishing 24 degrees below freezing; that just couldn’t be right. Stevenson and his engineers assumed the thermometer was malfunctioning, and took note of the numbers, but kept the data to themselves.

As he hunched over McAuliffe to inspect her helmet one last time, he looked down into her face and saw that her Girl Scout pluck had deserted her at last. In her eyes he saw neither excitement nor anticipation, but recognized only one emotion: terror.

In Houston, the engineers on the Flight Dynamics Console, still baffled by their radar data, had called up the Range Safety Officer at the Cape. Could he see anything? “It all blew up,” he replied. “Say that again?” “It all blew up.” “What did?” “The shuttle.”

“I’m not interested in anything but making a public scapegoat out of Larry Mulloy and Thiokol management,” he said. “The man has lied under oath. I have an American hero in Allan McDonald. This will be a public performance.”

The three days of hearings devoted to what Rogers called “possible human error” came to an end on February 27, almost exactly a month after Challenger disintegrated nearly nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean. By that time, the name of Morton Thiokol had become a byword for failure, and the painstakingly nurtured public image of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been demolished. The hours of often conflicting testimony and remorseless cross-examination had dispelled any lingering notion that the accident had been caused by an inexplicable technical failure—revealing instead a pattern of mismanagement and miscommunication at the highest levels of the agency. An organization that had, since its inception, boasted of its ability to manage extraordinary risk on the frontiers of technology and learn from its mistakes had instead overlooked a litany of clear warnings; the signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture bred by repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible. Seduced by their own mythos, and blind to the subtleties of engineering complexity that none of them fully understood, the nation’s smartest minds had unwittingly sent seven men and women to their deaths.