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

by Adam Higginbotham

Yet now Collins was standing on her doorstep, solemn and alone. There could be only one explanation. “I know, Mike,” she said. “But you’ve got to tell me.”

But over the next five years, a growing team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, engaged in a project of experimental engineering on a scale nearly unprecedented in history, achieved a series of developmental leaps that enabled NASA to close the gap with the Soviet program:

Many of the astronauts were not merely skilled pilots, but technicians with expertise and advanced qualifications in aeronautical engineering and celestial mechanics. From the very beginning, they recognized that they were placing their lives in the hands of government contractors who were often inventing the technology of space travel as they went along. When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”

The major faults with the spacecraft were not on the agenda, and the discussion focused mainly on a succession of minor glitches or issues that had been discussed before. Nevertheless, the meeting wound on for six hours.

The designers regarded the equipment necessary to create a mixed-gas environment as too heavy and complex to carry into space, and flight surgeons feared that an astronaut breathing nitrogen and oxygen might suffer decompression sickness—the “bends”—if the capsule lost cabin pressure in orbit.

The two managers began shouting at each other until, at last, the NASA official ended the argument. “You are the contractor,” he said. “You do as you’re told. Period.”

The agency understood the potential consequences of this decision. In July 1963, an internal NASA document reported that, in tests of the pure-oxygen atmosphere, “[i]t has been observed that a number of otherwise nonflammable materials, even human skin, will burst into flame.”

The contingency plan outlined in the 1963 document was simple: “Fires in the spacecraft must be precluded at all costs.”

The NASA managers and astronauts alike were in the grip of what they would later recognize as “ ‘Go’ Fever”—the desperate drive to push on toward a launch and keep to the schedule, regardless of the problems, in the belief that if they just kept going they could fix all the faults along the way.

Remote and inhospitable, the location had been selected with care by agency engineers: from the coastal launchpads, their spacecraft would fly east out over the Atlantic, away from populated areas; and its proximity to the equator meant that the rotation of the Earth would give the massive rockets a boost to escape gravity.

Two seconds later, Chaffee—whose responsibility it was to maintain contact with the ground in an emergency—said, in a calm, disciplined voice, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.” A few miles away, inside a control room on Merritt Island, one of the North American engineers monitoring the test looked up from his notes. He turned to the man at the next console. “Did he say, ‘Fire’?” he asked. “What the hell are they talking about?”

the only fire extinguisher they could find. It took the five men some five minutes, crawling in relay through the heat and choking smoke so thick they could barely see, to prize the heavy hatches off Spacecraft 012.

Gus Grissom and Ed White lay at the foot of the hatch, their pressure suits fused together by the fire. Roger Chaffee remained strapped to his couch, where he had kept communications open until the end. Melted into the Teflon surface of the cockpit window was a single handprint, outlined in soot.

Just as they had when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the lunar surface some three years earlier, US TV networks carried live pictures of the Apollo 17 mission. This time, however, viewers called the CBS switchboard in frustration: the coverage had made them miss the latest developments in the hot hospital drama, Medical Center.

The MOL program marked the beginning of a sometimes bitter struggle that would endure for decades, between the well-defined civilian and scientific openness of NASA and the Pentagon’s clandestine hunger to extend the Cold War beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

The X-15 ejection seat, a massive device equipped with automatic clamps designed to pin its occupant’s arms and legs safely in place as he was shot free of the crippled aircraft by a powerful rocket motor, was supposed to work at speeds of up to Mach 4 and altitudes of 120,000 feet. But few of the pilots believed that.

In a pair of flights in the summer of 1963, veteran test pilot Joe Walker took the X-15 beyond 330,000 feet, over the internationally recognized boundary of space—the Karman Line, sixty-two miles up—unofficially becoming the first man in history to travel into space twice.

Part of the purpose of Adams’s flight was to conduct a series of atmospheric experiments, including one to collect micrometeorites, and use an electromechanical probe to gather data on solar radiation. Yet when activated—and unbeknownst to either Adams or the team monitoring the flight from the ground—the probe began creating electrical interference, which disabled the computer and automatic control systems of the X-15.

There were no known ways to recover from one. Indeed, to Pete Knight and the experienced engineers manning the ground control station, the idea that a hypersonic plane could enter a spin in flight seemed impossible.

The experimental probe that had failed during Adams’s ascent employed an electric drive that had never been tested for use at high altitude—but had been flown before, so technicians assumed it would be okay to fly again. Although, years earlier, Adams had participated in a centrifuge test that had revealed he suffered from vertigo so acute that it might incapacitate him in flight for minutes at a time, the information was never shared with the medical staff at Edwards.

In January 1968, Freida Adams drove from her new home in Louisiana to Barksdale Air Force Base, where she accepted the award of her husband’s silver astronaut wings, distinguishing Adams as the first American to die in spaceflight. The remains of the X-15 that killed him were buried at an unmarked site in the desert.

Yet the X-15 had far surpassed its initial goals. And, despite the shadow cast over its record by Adams’s death, it came to be regarded as the most successful flight research project in history. The aircraft proved so far ahead of its time that some of the speed and altitude records set by its pilots would remain unbroken for more than fifty years;

But the most important discoveries made by the pilots flying the rocket plane were among the most obvious: with the X-15, NASA had established practical design principles for a winged spacecraft that could return to Earth from orbit.

part due to the pork barrel politics that had seen congressmen jostling to bring a part of the lunar bonanza into their districts, NASA facilities had ended up being constructed at sites scattered across the country in a network of semiautonomous “centers”: it was no coincidence that the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, soon to be renamed in Johnson’s honor, had found a home not only in the President’s home state, but close to the districts of the handful of local politicians with seats on key congressional committees.

Finally, in 1966, frustrated and angry, Dwight resigned his commission, took a job at IBM, and eventually became a successful sculptor.

And yet: beneath these crisp certainties, obscured amid the blizzard of charts, data-filled binders, and Viewgraph slides, the rocket engineers failed to realize that they had reached a critical inflection point. Over the course of the years they had been developing and flying the solid rocket motors, the men at Thiokol and Marshall had slowly expanded the parameters of what they regarded as acceptable risk in the joints. Incrementally, they had begun to accept as normal problems that deviated dangerously from the original design standards set for the boosters—and the seals that constrained the seething power of their volatile propellant in flight.

Back in Utah, these issues continued to worry the beleaguered and overworked Al McDonald. But he was reassured by the rigorous process, the tests, and the findings of his own heat-transfer experts and structures specialists. Above all, McDonald well understood that riding rockets was a dangerous business; and he believed that after each mission, the men and women flying aboard the shuttle reviewed exactly the same kind of postflight data that he and his engineers worked so hard to produce—and, as a result, astronauts like McNair, Scobee, and Resnik understood exactly where the relative risks posed by his solid rockets lay amid the constellation of hazards they faced on their route to orbit. He was mistaken.

One scientist at Johns Hopkins instead proposed inviting only the wealthiest members of society to become gentlemen space travelers, suggesting that NASA help create a network of exclusive “Shuttle Clubs”; modeled on the New York Yacht Club, these would solicit funds from the richest cliques in America to underwrite their own trips into orbit, “much,” he suggested, “as they succeeded in providing sailing ships to compete in the America’s Cup.”

On the same day it released the news about Joe Kerwin’s analysis of the emergency air packs, a NASA spokesman explained that engineers listening to a garbled portion at the end of the recording had picked out something else from the noise and distortion. It was the voice of Jane Smith’s husband: “Uh-oh.”

In the end, it would be almost three years before the shuttle flew once more. Late on the bright, almost windless, morning of September 29, 1988, Discovery cleared the tower at Cape Canaveral carrying a small veteran crew, equipped with a rudimentary new escape system, and riding on Thiokol’s redesigned solid rocket boosters. When the shuttle touched down safely at Edwards Air Force Base four days later, the astronauts were met by an audience of 380,000 people and a band playing the national anthem, as the CapCom in Mission Control heralded their triumphant return: “Welcome back, Discovery,” he said. “A great ending to a new beginning.”

And for more than fourteen years after Discovery’s successful return to flight, the Space Shuttle flew routinely and successfully—completing a total of eighty-seven further missions by the end of 2002.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, Feynman wrote, for nature cannot be fooled.

My discovery of a draft of Boisjoly’s book, on an unmarked CD buried in a file box at the National Air and Space Museum, was a turning point in my research.

This encouraged a subtly mounting tolerance for risk, even as new faults were discovered in the shuttle and chronic problems went unresolved—a concept that the sociologist Diane Vaughan called “the normalization of deviance.” When combined with the political, commercial, and public-relations pressure on the agency to keep flying, in retrospect it’s clear that an accident was all but inevitable.

The investigation failed, however, to emphasize that the intended mission for this new spacecraft had been changed from manned to unmanned when the capsule was half built—and that North American had installed an additional fifteen miles of wiring to fly the craft on automatic systems.

The shuttle was “an order of magnitude more complex” than the Apollo spacecraft, according to Bob Sieck; author interview, October 26, 2020. “People don’t appreciate that the shuttle, as a technical goal, is much more ambitious than the moon program,” MIT professor Eugene Covert told the Washington Monthly in 1980:

The experience was more terrifying still for those on the ground. When heart rate monitors were attached to both pilots and flight controllers, the controllers’ recorded pulse rates during the flights were even higher than those of the men in the aircraft.

(The first Black person in space would eventually be a Cuban of African descent, Brigadier General Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, a member of a joint Soviet-Cuban mission to the Salyut 6 space station, in 1980.)

At one point, the tiles also fell victim to deliberate sabotage. NASA had once ensured that all contracted employees working on what it called “life-dependent systems” of the manned program—the failure of which would kill astronauts—were subject to full background checks. But budget cuts meant that the agency could no longer afford such thorough vetting. As a result, NASA did not know that Rockwell had begun running a small, part-time program employing formerly incarcerated men to glue the insulation tiles on the orbiter. To their horror, random quality-control inspection at the Rockwell plant in California revealed that many of the tiles installed on the spacecraft had been punctured with sharp tools. An agency investigation discovered that the technicians had been sabotaging the tiles to make more work, in the hope of having their contracts extended. Correcting the damage took months.

The shuttle hardware was deliberately designed to incorporate as many redundant systems as possible, and some components were duplicated several times to provide backups in case of failure. For example, the shuttle was equipped with a total of five IBM avionics computers, so that if one malfunctioned, the crew could continue their mission as if nothing had happened; if two or three failed, the orbiter could keep flying without obvious difficulty, but the crew might have to return to Earth earlier than planned. These components, with multiple redundancies, NASA designated Criticality 3, or 2R; those with a single backup were designated Criticality 1R. But those parts on the Critical Items List that were reviewed with the most care before launch were the Criticality 1 components, with no redundancy at all; if any one of these failed in flight, the result would spell disaster: “Loss of vehicle, mission and crew.”

NASA officials gave serious consideration to sending Sesame Street puppeteer Caroll Spinney—in his costume as Big Bird—into orbit, and the agency sent a letter to Spinney soliciting his opinion. He agreed to go, but the logistics of storing the puppet costume aboard the orbiter proved tricky, and the plan was never approved.

“but if we start trivializing space—sending every butcher, baker and candlestick maker—the American people will start seeing this as a space bus to take people on joy rides.”

The fire was the result of a rare summer storm passing over the plant, during which a bolt of lightning struck Mix House M-24, causing an electrical malfunction in the blades of a remote-controlled six hundred-gallon mixing bowl filled with seven thousand pounds of shuttle propellant: