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.”

An end to manned spaceflight, Weinberger wrote, would “be confirming… a belief that I fear is gaining credence at home and abroad: that our best years are behind us.”

The work was Sisyphean: tiles that had not been densified now had to be removed and modified one by one, and subjected to quality control tests verifying everything from the size of the gaps between them to the aerodynamic forces required to tear them off.

It would be the most hazardous mission in NASA’s history; Easterbrook’s story warned in blunt terms how years of shrinking budgets and expedient decision-making had drastically increased the risk of a catastrophic failure, one in which the lives of astronauts would be sacrificed for a national future in space that was largely illusory. “Here’s the plan,” he wrote. “Suppose one of the solid rocket boosters fails. The plan is, you die.”

When fully assembled, each of the boosters stood nearly fifteen stories high and weighed 590 tons—the largest solid rockets ever built; before each shuttle flight, a pair of them had to be transported on eight heavy-duty flatbed railcars across the country, from the manufacturing facilities of the contractor, the Thiokol Corporation, in northwestern Utah, to Cape Canaveral: a twelve-day journey crossing eight states, covering more than two thousand miles.

Nine minutes after takeoff, Flight 981 had reached an altitude of 11,500 feet when the left rear cargo door of the aircraft burst open, causing an explosive decompression of the fuselage.

By the beam of his flashlight, he could see that the honey-colored grease that had been packed between the primary and secondary O-rings before launch was now coal black—colored by traces of scorched putty, vaporized rubber, and burned propellant—evidence of an unprecedented failure in the seals, and a grotesque escalation in the degree and complexity of damage inside the rockets’ most critical joints.

“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.

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.

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.

To men and women across the United States, the almost ideal diversity of the Challenger crew—“one of everything”—may have been enough to make the tragedy seem personal.

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.

By examining the tissues of the crew, they hoped to be able to deduce what conditions had been like inside the shuttle cabin in the minutes before its final disintegration: whether the astronauts had been killed almost instantly by an explosive high-altitude depressurization; if the skin of the compartment had been ruptured, admitting toxic hypergolic propellant from the spacecraft’s Orbital Maneuvering System; or if a slow leak of the cabin atmosphere had rendered them slowly unconscious in their seats as the wreckage fell back toward the Earth.

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.