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

by Adam Higginbotham

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Millions of people watched the Challenger disaster unfold and this is the first detailed account of exactly what happened that day. Tense and fast-paced, this is journalism at its best.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on fascinating new archival research and in-depth reporting—a riveting history that reads like a thriller.

On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told. Until now.

Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger: An American Tragedy follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a compelling tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and later hidden from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space. A masterful blend of riveting human drama and fascinating and absorbing science, Challenger brings to life a turning point in history—and the result is an even more complex and astonishing story than we remember.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781797179506
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Adam Higginbotham has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and Smithsonian. The author of Midnight in Chernobyl and Challenger: An American Tragedy, he lives in New York City.

Jacques Roy is a audio narrator and actor, known for The Lower Angels and Room and Board.

Editorial Reviews

★ 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)

Publishers Weekly

The Challenger space shuttle disaster—in which millions of people watched, in real time, as the shuttle exploded, killing all on board—was a pivotal moment for American culture, and certainly its space program. Higginbotham, the author of Midnight in Chernobyl, tells the 1986 story in granular detail, using vivid reporting and new archival research to describe a true-life thriller with all-too-real consequences.” —New York Times

“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)

“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)

“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

“Gripping and memorable, a definitive account of an American tragedy.” —Ed Caesar, author of The Moth and the Mountain

PRAISE FOR MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL:

“Superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying . . . the accident unfurls with a horrible inevitability. Weaving together the experiences of those who were there that night, Higginbotham marshals the details so meticulously that every step feels spring-loaded with tension. . . . Amid so much rich reporting and scrupulous analysis, some major themes emerge. . . . Higginbotham’s extraordinary book is another advance in the long struggle to fill in some of the gaps, bringing much of what was hidden into the light.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“A gripping miss-your-subway-stop read . . . Higginbotham captures the nerve-racked Soviet atmosphere brilliantly.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A compelling, panoramic account.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“An account that reads almost like the script for a movie . . . Mr. Higginbotham has captured the terrible drama.” —The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews