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

by Adam Higginbotham

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 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.

“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.

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.

But as Challenger shuddered through Max Q, it was 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.

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.

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