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.”

Yet Grissom felt his warnings were going unheard. 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.

Cernan, thirty-eight years old, a Navy pilot who had grown up milking the cows on the Wisconsin farm where his grandparents lived without electricity, would be the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon.

By decade’s end, the extraordinary success of the project had been matched only by its exorbitant cost: at its peak, NASA had some four hundred thousand men and women at work on Apollo, and the price of the program’s support facilities alone was $2.2 billion; the technology and materials of the lunar lander were so exotic that each one cost fifteen times its weight in gold. 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.

To support its case and make the numbers more plausible, NASA sought support from the Air Force—and Pentagon backing proved decisive in finally winning presidential endorsement for the shuttle. But in exchange, NASA had allowed the Air Force to set two specifications for the orbiter that would profoundly complicate its design.

Other key parts of the original concept would soon be abandoned, too—including the rocket-powered escape system necessary to save the crew if the spacecraft faced imminent destruction, especially during launch. Another of Faget’s innovations, some version of this system had been built into every previous NASA manned spacecraft since the beginning of the program; but now weight—and cost—meant that it had to go.

The onboard computers relayed pressure readings from inside the boosters’ combustion chambers down to the consoles in Mission Control, providing a real-time forecast of when their burn would be complete; but the flight controllers knew that any attempt to jettison them before the fuel was consumed—a little more than two minutes after launch—would result in the prompt immolation of the 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.

And yet: beneath these crisp certainties, obscured amid the blizzard of charts, data-filled binders, and Viewgraph slides, the rocket engineers failed to realize that they had reached a critical inflection point. 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.

“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.

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. Yet five of the seven were trained astronauts, and all but one were aerospace professionals, each of whom had understood and accepted the risks inherent in their mission. Christa McAuliffe was different. Not only had she captivated the attention of the nation’s schoolchildren, but she had embodied the hopes of all those adults who believed, however remotely, that her journey was bringing the Walter Mitty fantasy of citizen spaceflight within their grasp. More than anything else, the poignant public death of the world’s first Everyman astronaut made the loss of Challenger a shared tragedy: an instant-replay televised martyrdom in which everyone watching played a part.

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.

Bob Ebeling, the hot-tempered seals expert at Thiokol who had wanted to shut down the company’s production of the shuttle solid rockets until the joint was redesigned, took each dismissal as a personal victory, and crowed in triumph when he heard the news. But Ebeling and the other whistleblowers at the Promontory plant had paid a steep price for their role in bringing the truth to light. In the weeks after Al McDonald’s and Roger Boisjoly’s shocking initial testimony before the commission, Thiokol’s upper management had acknowledged their employees’ apparent lack of loyalty with a show of corporate displeasure.

By then, Richard Feynman, too, was dead, but his blunt conclusion in Appendix F had became famous. His words had proved prophetic, and provided an epitaph not only for NASA’s heroic goals with the National Space Transportation System, but for many of the historic catastrophes caused by mankind’s overconfidence in his own ingenuity. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, Feynman wrote, for nature cannot be fooled.