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

by Adam Higginbotham

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.