★ 03/18/2024

In this gripping history, bestseller Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl) recaps the Jan. 28, 1986, explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger soon after liftoff, killing all seven crew members, and the tragedy’s roots in a culture of negligence and recklessness at NASA. He explores the flaws that plagued the fiendishly complex shuttle design, focusing on the rubber O-rings used to seal joints in the shuttle’s twin solid rocket boosters to prevent catastrophic leaks of hot gas during lift-off. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the rockets’ manufacturer, noticed worrisome signs that the O-rings could fail, especially in cold weather—like the sub-freezing temperatures at Cape Canaveral on the day of the launch. Higginbotham narrates the tense conference at which Morton Thiokol’s engineers pleaded with NASA to postpone the launch, only to have NASA officials, determined to quicken the pace of launches for budgetary reasons, pressure them into green-lighting it. Higginbotham’s colorful narrative contrasts the eager idealism of Challenger’s crew, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, with the arrogance of NASA honchos who dismissed warnings and casually gambled with the astronauts’ lives. His account of the engineering issues is lucid and meticulous, and his evocative prose conveys both the extraordinary achievement of rocket scientists in harnessing colossal energies with delicate mechanisms and the sudden cataclysms that erupt when the machinery fails. The result is a beguiling saga of the peril and promise of spaceflight. (May)

Superb . . . In the hands of Higginbotham, the narrative comes to life in a fresh telling fueled by meticulous detail and exacting prose. While familiar, the story is rendered dreamlike so that readers can’t help but hope, as it unfolds page by page, that somehow the outcome this time will be different. . . . A compelling and exhaustively researched chronicle of the calamity that traces its full arc—the evolution of the enabling culture that allowed it, the terrible day itself, and its enduring legacy.” —Washington Post

“Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the dozens of major and minor players involved in NASA’s many successful, and occasionally catastrophic, space missions. . . . For cynical Americans, disaster buffs, and engineers, Challenger will be a quick, devastating read. In Higginbotham’s deft hands, the human element—sometimes heroic, sometimes cloaked in doublespeak and bluster—shines through the many technical aspects of this story, a constant reminder that every decision was made by people weighing risks versus expediency, their minds distorted by power, money, politics, and yes-men. It’s a universal story that transcends time.” —New York Times

“Dramatic . . . Mr. Higginbotham’s prose grows taut as the Challenger liftoff approaches. . . . [A] moving narrative.” —Wall Street Journal

“Gripping history . . . Higginbotham’s colorful narrative contrasts the eager idealism of Challenger’s crew, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, with the arrogance of NASA honchos who dismissed warnings and casually gambled with the astronauts’ lives. His account of the engineering issues is lucid and meticulous, and his evocative prose conveys both the extraordinary achievement of rocket scientists in harnessing colossal energies with delicate mechanisms and the sudden cataclysms that erupt when the machinery fails. The result is a beguiling saga of the peril and promise of spaceflight.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In clear and accessible language, Higginbotham explains the mechanics of the shuttle and its problems without sacrificing any of the pace that carries readers forward. . . . The book delivers a compelling, comprehensive history of the disaster that exposed, as Higginbotham writes, how ‘the nation’s smartest minds had unwittingly sent seven men and women to their deaths.’” —Associated Press

“A deeply researched, fluently written study in miscommunication, hubris, and technological overreach.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Higginbotham’s comprehensive and affecting recounting and explanation illuminates a tragedy that was entirely preventable.” —Booklist (starred review)

“An extensive, bolt-by-bolt history . . . Challenger provides readers with plenty to think about, thanks to its author’s wide-ranging, thorough efforts.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Adam Higginbotham has written a gripping, eye-opening, moving, and finely detailed history of not just an infamous disaster but a whole generation of the Space Age. Picking up where Tom Wolfe left off, this book stands as the fascinating sequel to The Right Stuff, mixing together science, politics, and space exploration and providing a unique window into the lives of those Americans who have reached for the stars. Even though you know how the story ends, you'll eagerly turn the beautifully written pages wondering what comes next. Challenger is one of this generation’s best nonfiction writers working at the top of his game.” —Garrett M. Graff, author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate

“A masterly example of how meticulous research and adherence to factual detail can build a narrative of almost unbearable suspense. At the same time, with the outcome known from the beginning, the story has the implacable power of tragic inevitability.” —Geoff Dyer, author of The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings

★ 2024-04-02
A searching history of a disaster-laden effort to build and launch a space shuttle.

Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl, begins in 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger experienced what a controller dispassionately called “obviously a major malfunction,” exploding with no survivors. He then looks backward at a fraught moment in earlier NASA history, when a fire in the inaugural Apollo capsule killed the three astronauts aboard, “the most lethal accident in the short history of the US space program.” Mission commander Gus Grissom had noted shoddy construction beforehand, and the rush to get the spacecraft into space before the Russians could claim the Moon led to deadly shortcuts. As the author capably chronicles, the space shuttle program began with major obstacles—not just the technical hurdles of building a reusable shuttle capable of withstanding the rigors of launch and reentry, but also “a further new parameter, one of which NASA had no existing experience: a limited budget.” That tight budget, imposed by Nixon-era austerity measures reducing a $14 billion request to just $5.5 billion, “the first of many fatal compromises,” led to shortcuts in construction that NASA leaders overlooked even as contractors voiced worries about them. Famous scenes from the Challenger postmortem are seared in memory, including when physicist Richard Feynman plunged a rubber O-ring into ice water to show its instability in cold temperatures. Unlike Apollo, the space shuttle program was effectively terminated, if slowly, after a second shuttle, Columbia, exploded, with NASA engineers and administrators having ignored “signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture of repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible.” Higginbotham’s book is without Tom Wolfe’s flash, but it’s a worthy bookend to The Right Stuff—albeit marred by the wrong stuff—all the same.

A deeply researched, fluently written study in miscommunication, hubris, and technological overreach.