The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA's Challenger Disaster

by Kevin Cook

Asked if he ever felt fear on the job, Scobee said yes. “You would be stupid not to have a healthy fear. There’s six and a half million pounds of thrust under you. But you have to risk something to gain anything.”

Beggs admitted privately that the agency could effectively manage only “around a dozen” shuttle flights per year. There were fourteen more, including the Teacher in Space flight, lined up for the rest of 1986, with nineteen on the docket for 1987. Such a schedule kept the pressure mounting on everyone from Beggs down to shuttle-maintenance crews at Cape Canaveral. To keep up, some KSC technicians worked up to eighty hours a week for seven or eight weeks in a row.

Desert. As the shuttle program’s flow director, Harrington was responsible for assuring that all four of the so-called orbiters in the shuttle fleet—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis—had the hardware they needed to fly efficiently and safely. But with so many missions so close together, the government contractors that manufactured orbiter components fell behind schedule. NASA answered the need by transplanting pieces of one shuttle to another. The agency’s own term for this process was “cannibalization.” After Commander Hoot Gibson glided Columbia to a landing at Edwards, workers removed forty-five key components, including a nose-wheel steering box, an air sensor for the crew cabin, and one of the shuttle’s five onboard computers, and loaded them into the T-38.

Twenty-five years after watching Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight from a middle-school cafeteria she was about to be part of history, her subject. She was about to join a line of pioneers tracing back to Shepard and the other original astronauts, the Mercury Seven, a line she hoped would continue to generations of “ordinary people” who would follow her into space. As she’d put it in one of her interviews, “The people who went to the moon, because they were able to see the whole world as this globe, came back with a much better perspective of why we all should work together. Because we are pretty fragile, when you look at the whole universe. So maybe as more and more people get that perspective, things are gonna change.”

“We’ve done a lot for diversity when it comes to race, gender, and sexual orientation. We need more diversity of opinion. We need to build in a tolerance for people who will throw their careers in front of a runaway train. And when they do, we need bosses who will say, ‘I’ve got your back.’”