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

by Adam Higginbotham

Although none of the women discussed it, they all knew they were being watched for signs of weakness. And they were determined to disappoint those who expected them to fail.

Thiokol inspectors filed a report about the damage to the O-rings with the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. But it wasn’t a high-priority problem. Plans for the next flight proceeded regardless.

Ride was an uncompromising feminist who refused to tolerate sexist jokes from her male colleagues with a dismissive eye roll, and campaigned against the slightest perception that men and women might be treated differently in space.

Resnik designed bright pink bumper stickers, made up in a local print shop, reading A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE COCKPIT; Ride fixed one to the front of her desk in the Astronaut Office.

NASA managers apparently feared that, if the American people learned that it now required an emergency escape system, they might realize that the Space Shuttle was more dangerous than they had been led to believe. The astronauts themselves, however, had few illusions about the perils of their new spacecraft.

With no control and no means of escape, this made the first 122 seconds of flight the most dangerous part of any mission aboard the shuttle.

The issue had never even been discussed at a single Flight Readiness Review, and no word of any trouble with the O-rings had ever reached the Astronaut Office.

Only if the gas could somehow completely burn through or bypass the first O-ring and then also breach the backup seal, giving the gases from inside the rocket a direct route into the atmosphere, could an unlimited leak begin; then the problem would become catastrophic. But the possibility of that happening seemed vanishingly remote.

Whatever was going on in the booster joints was getting worse. And they didn’t understand why.

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.

But Kraft also chided the astronauts for suggesting that it had been easy. “Because it was difficult,” he told them. “I know it and you know it, and your making it look too easy is not helpful to the space program in the long run.” Now, Kraft implied, the public would expect perfection from the agency every time.

STS-51-A mission represented a kind of zenith of NASA’s image as an institution of almost infinite cleverness and ingenuity, one that could routinely extend the limits of human achievement. Like many of his colleagues, the commander had come to think of himself and the agency around him as almost infallible. And

citing his lack of spending on education, the nation’s largest teaching union dismissed the President’s announcement as an electioneering gimmick. “We don’t need to send one teacher into space,” the union president said. “We need to send all teachers into their classrooms fully equipped and ready to help students learn. Sending a teacher into outer space won’t solve the problems in schools on earth.” On Capitol Hill, former astronaut Senator John Glenn opposed the initiative as dangerous and frivolous.

she signed a contract waiving her rights to government benefits including life insurance;

he emphasized that there would never be pressure to fly at the cost of safety.

NASA estimated that, collectively, the crews at the Cape had to put in the equivalent of three years of work on the ground for every minute each orbiter spent in space.

the grand spectacle of shuttle launches now seemed to be taking place so frequently that they were rarely carried live by the major networks.

with each successive launch, there were fewer and fewer journalists assigned to the Cape; many of those who remained were on a “death watch”—ensuring that they would be there to provide on-the-spot coverage in the event of a catastrophe.

She was astonished when, during one parental visiting day, a professor took her mother and father aside to tell them that he knew Jenny had only enrolled there to find a husband—and that by doing so she was depriving a serious male student of a valuable place.

When she began her internship in the wind tunnel department at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, at first the men there refused to speak to her: “We had a girl once, and she didn’t work out,” one explained.

‘It’s a strange feeling to realize that every part on this capsule was made by the lowest bidder.’ ”

With leaks on such a scale, he was astonished that Discovery hadn’t been blown to pieces on the launchpad. And he thought immediately of the cold.

told them what he thought: that the rockets had almost been crippled by the freezing weather at the Cape. “Guys,” he said, “you probably don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It is my technical opinion that the precipitating cause of this event was temperature.”

Although it stood to reason that the weather had made the O-rings less elastic—that was a matter of elementary physics—he could not prove that the cold had caused the leaks, because no one had ever tested the seals’ effectiveness across a range of temperatures. In the strict regime of NASA’s Flight Readiness Reviews—and especially the rigidly Teutonic traditions of the Marshall Space Flight Center—this absence of causal evidence was unscientific, tantamount to a hunch.

while the Thiokol engineers now at last ordered up a series of tests at the Promontory plant to see how the O-rings might function at low temperatures, the experiments were hardly a priority.

Carried up through the long review process in a series of presentations by Mulloy himself, gradually trimmed and condensed as the rules required, by the time the Thiokol recommendations reached NASA headquarters on February 21, 1985, they contained no mention of low temperatures at all.

In cold weather, the rings would become so inflexible that they might fail to seal against the metal surfaces of the casing—and not just in the first moments after the rockets lit, but at any point during their two-minute flight. But when Boisjoly reported the findings to his manager in the engineering department at Thiokol, he told him to keep the data to himself; it would be too damaging to the company if anyone at NASA learned what they had found.

This was clear evidence that the lives of the shuttle crew had relied on the backup seal alone for the entire duration of the rockets’ journey. The flight had been a perilously narrow escape: only much later would the astronauts learn that they had been as little as three-tenths of a second away from an explosion in the solid rocket booster that would have torn apart the orbiter and killed everyone on board.

But McDonald confided that, although he was frightened by what he understood about the engineering limitations of the shuttle program, he was kept awake at night by thoughts of what he might not. “It’s what I don’t know that scares me the most,” he said.

Roger Boisjoly, still waiting for an official response to his long list of potential solutions to the O-ring problem, was growing desperate: he couldn’t get anyone in management to listen to his concerns; the informal five-man task force had so far accomplished nothing; and he was worried that their effort would simply be allowed to languish until it was too late. Apprehension of a disaster caused by the seals—and his potential responsibility for it—tormented him daily, making it hard to concentrate;

“Data obtained on resiliency of the O-rings,” he had written, “indicate that lower temperatures aggravated this problem.” Mulloy instructed McDonald to remove this statement from the presentation in its entirety.

the parts of the system most likely to let them down were people.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air.… Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark nor ever eagle flew— And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

McAuliffe, she said, was “the closest thing we have to a hero these days.”

was adamant: he told his colleagues that no one in their right mind would fire the shuttle boosters in temperatures lower than they had witnessed the year before; the launch must be stopped.

results of the tests on the O-rings from the year before—which had shown the seals would be practically useless when the weather was cold. As

represented the unanimous recommendation of all fourteen managers and engineers who would eventually gather in the MIC room, including even Jerry Mason and Cal Wiggins: Do not launch.

as the temperature dropped, the performance of the seal declined:

made clear that the engineers regarded these conditions as profoundly dangerous.

made it different from all previous Flight Readiness Reviews. In the past, if a contractor’s data about the state of flight hardware had been inconclusive, the default position was not to fly: they were expected to prove that their equipment and components constituted an acceptable risk before launch. Now, it seemed, Mulloy was asking them to prove the opposite—to show him the data that proved conclusively it was not safe to launch.

also buffeted by the worst high-altitude wind shear yet encountered on a shuttle flight. The entire shuttle stack flexed and twisted in the turbulence, shattering the delicate glassy residues that had resealed the hemorrhaged rocket motor. At fifty-eight seconds, an orange flame flared through the field joint at the bottom of the right booster.

was clear that—however sophisticated NASA’s contingency plans might have been—no one at the agency had prepared for a catastrophe like this.

anchored the disaster as a pivotal moment in American history.

Reagan described not just grief at the deaths of seven men and women, but a loss of national innocence, experienced in real time by children and adults across the country: a shattering of confidence in the promise of high technology that had so far endured through two decades of reversals at home and abroad.

“The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives,” he said. “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

many felt the loss of the seven astronauts as a shattering blow—a national bereavement unlike any event since the assassination of John Kennedy more than twenty years before.

was clear that the accident was not simply a technical failure—but also, perhaps, one of drastic human error.

“The data was inconclusive, and so you said, ‘Go ahead!’ ” Sally Ride said. Richard Feynman made clear that Mason’s decision to overturn his engineers’ advice to postpone the flight had no empirical foundation; it had, instead, been a reckless gamble.

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.

Tumbling gently in free fall, it took two minutes and forty-five seconds for the broken section of Challenger to hit the Atlantic, and it now seemed possible that the seven members of the crew might have been alive the whole way down.