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

by Adam Higginbotham

In early October, Shea had received a letter from Hilliard Paige, a senior executive at the Missile and Space Division of General Electric, advising NASA on spacecraft safety issues. Paige had recently witnessed a combustion test conducted by one of his staff on samples of Velcro in a pure-oxygen environment. He had watched, aghast, as the material ignited in a flash and was abruptly consumed by flames. The technician told Paige that he had tried bringing the issue to NASA, but had found it hard to get their attention. Paige made his fears explicit: “I do not think it technically prudent to be unduly influenced by the ground and flight success history of Mercury and Gemini under a 100 percent oxygen environment,” he wrote. “The first fire in a spacecraft may well be fatal.”

“If any man in this room asks for whom the Apollo bell tolls,” Webb said, “it tolls for him and me, as well as for Grissom, White, and Chaffee. It tolls for every astronaut test pilot who will lose his life in the space-simulated vacuum of a test chamber or the real vacuum of space.”

And when Neil Armstrong stepped from the footpad of the lunar lander into the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, an estimated 600 million people were watching live on television, and all three US networks dedicated their airtime to the events for thirty-six continuous hours. Two months later, Vice President Spiro Agnew laid out his timetable to land an American on Mars in 1986.

In total the project would cost the country an astonishing $28 billion—the equivalent to a third of all US military spending for 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War.

the crew of Apollo 15 had been reprimanded by NASA for smuggling hundreds of specially stamped envelopes to the moon and back as part of a scheme to sell them privately on their return and use the money to set up trust funds for their children. Separately, fifteen of the twenty-four Apollo astronauts were reported to have been charging for autographs, at $5 a time. Nixon’s Justice Department opened an investigation into what it called the “commercialization of space.” Humiliated NASA chiefs ensured that none of the three Apollo 15 crew would ever go into orbit again, but the myth of the perfect astronaut was shattered forever.

It looked ordinary enough: shaped like an aircraft, with a snub-nosed fuselage, short straight wings, and a horizontal tailplane with two vertical fins. As the assembled engineers looked on, Faget threw it twice across the room: first, it flew arrow-straight, just like a conventional aircraft; before he launched it a second time, he tilted the nose of the model up toward the ceiling at an angle of sixty degrees. Yet now his creation maintained this attitude throughout its flight path, presenting its entire underside to the path of onrushing air, as if falling, horizontally, through space. The engineers didn’t need Faget to explain the meaning of his demonstration: this was an elegant aerodynamic design for a spaceplane, one that would present its broad underside to diffuse the extreme heat of reentry, just like his teardrop-shaped capsule, and then tilt nose-down to glide through Earth’s atmosphere like a conventional plane. “We are going to build the next-generation spacecraft,” Faget announced.

Intended to blast off like a rocket, go into orbit like a spacecraft, and land like an airplane, almost every element of the proposed new ship would have to survive the full range of the extraordinary forces exerted on man and machine by spaceflight. These would begin with liftoff, where the acoustic shock of its rocket engines screaming in unison could reach 167 decibels—powerful enough to kill a human being. As it ascended and accelerated, the shuttle would be buffeted by wind resistance and drag equivalent to several times its weight on the ground, until it reached the point known by the engineers as “Max Q”—the point at which the airframe risks being torn to pieces by the forces of maximum aerodynamic stress. On reaching the vacuum of space, it would be plunged into temperatures of minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit—the “cold soak,” low enough to embrittle metal to the point that it can shatter like hard candy. On reentry, the skin of the craft, enveloped by ionizing air and blazing plasma, would heat from cold soak to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit—high enough to melt steel—and reach a velocity of up to twenty-five times the speed of sound before slowing to a few hundred miles an hour to land on its own undercarriage under the control of its pilots.

Engineers predicted that, by the early 1970s, a fleet of X-20s—traveling at the speed of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but guided by a human pilot—would be ready to intercept and destroy Soviet satellites and conduct rescue missions in space, spy on hostile territory, or deliver atomic bombs to targets deep inside the Soviet Union with little warning and terrifying accuracy. The Air Force spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars—more than $4 billion at twenty-first-century prices—on research and development work intended to overcome the many obstacles to flying such a complex machine.

Intended to glide back to Earth to land like an ordinary plane under the control of a pilot, Dyna-Soar was designed with a tricycle undercarriage of metal skids and wire brushes—because rubber tires were expected to melt and catch fire before the spaceplane reached the runway. In March 1962, the Air Force announced a team of six test pilots to fly their first missions into space, and began construction of a prototype. Six months later, they unveiled a full-scale plywood mock-up of the Dyna-Soar—a faintly bat-like black V-shaped aircraft with a rounded nose and broad delta wings swept sharply up at each end. Presented at the annual Air Force Association conference in Las Vegas, the X-20 caused a sensation: Reader’s Digest described this futuristic “space glider” as one of the most significant steps in aviation since the Wright brothers’ first flight.

Carried aloft beneath the wing of a B-52 bomber, the X-15 was dropped at a launch altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. The pilots fired their rocket engines for just ninety seconds, climbing steeply and accelerating to hypersonic speed, rising in a parabolic arc to the edge of space. They watched the curvature of the Earth expand beneath them, the sky darken from blue to black, and the pages of their cockpit flight plans float apart in zero gravity.

After Gene Cernan had crashed a NASA helicopter while buzzing women sunbathing on a beach near Cape Canaveral in 1971, Slayton concealed the true cause of the accident from Center Director Chris Kraft—to ensure that his good friend Geno did not lose his place as commander of the final mission to the moon. When it came time to replace Slayton, Chris Kraft had chosen Abbey for the job in part to wrestle control of the Astronaut Office back into the hands of the agency’s senior managers.

Two days later, NASA organized a press conference at the Cape with Hartsfield, who delivered a textbook performance of astronaut sangfroid. Discovery’s engines had shut down due to a faulty valve, and the fire had been caused by hydrogen propellant escaping from the rocket nozzles; as the gas burned with a transparent flame, it had been invisible to the crew—but could nonetheless have killed them if Resnik had opened the orbiter’s hatch.

In 1988, the American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded Roger Boisjoly the Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. He died in Nephi, Utah, on January 6, 2012. He was seventy-three.

In an interview he gave to NPR to mark the anniversary of the accident in 2016, Ebeling said, “I think that was one of the mistakes God made. He shouldn’t have picked me for that job… next time I talk to him, I’m going to ask him, ‘Why? You picked a loser.’ ” After the broadcast, for the first time since the disaster, Ebeling heard directly from those involved in the launch decision, including George Hardy and Bob Lund, assuring him that he bore no responsibility for the deaths of the Challenger crew. “You did all that you could do,” Lund told him. Ebeling succumbed to cancer two months later. He was eighty-nine.