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

by Adam Higginbotham

room. It was a perfect launch. Challenger was less than half a minute

Yikes

Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, already a vocal NASA critic, suggested the Apollo engineers were guilty of “criminal negligence.”

Two months later, Vice President Spiro Agnew laid out his timetable to land an American on Mars in 1986.

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.”

Dornberger once complained that Germany had been defeated because his subordinates on the V-2 program were “more interested in the possibilities of space travel than with victory in war,”

Fixing the reciprocating propeller engines of cargo planes on the flight line at nearby Kelly Air Force Base was as close as he could get to aircraft without being an aviator.

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 Marshall laboratory engineers went so far as to visit the Parker Seal Company in Kentucky, manufacturer of the O-rings, whose managers were astonished that their seals had performed as well as they had so far, and explained that they were not being used in the way they had intended.

But once technicians had prized the segments of the motor apart, the engineer noticed unmistakable signs of burning across an inch-long section of the primary Viton ring inside the forward field joint of one rocket—and more in the seal of the nozzle joint of the other. This was alarming news: it meant that the O-ring erosion discovered in 1981 was no longer an isolated exception, but a recurring issue. And this time it had happened in two places on the same flight.

It was clear that Roger Boisjoly’s suspicions had been correct: the performance of the O-rings—and the squeeze—was profoundly affected by temperature.

At the same time, McNair was collaborating in an ambitious new plan to play his saxophone in space—this time with the help of French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre.

McDonald no longer had any doubt: his boosters had killed the astronauts, after all.

Reporting to the NASA facility the next morning, Boisjoly received his security badges and got to work, but was struck by the lack of remorse he found among the Marshall engineers on the investigation.