As an English kid of the 80s there were a handful of times that the “boring” news reports my parents watched really cut through… Sadly, those were most often disasters. The Herald of Free Enterprise sinking, the Piper Alpha fire, and the subject of this book, the Challenger explosion. This is the fascinating in-depth story all the way from the inception of the Shuttle programme to the disaster enquiry.
It’s an incredibly detailed account starting way back during the Apollo missions, when the seeds of disaster were planted. A combination of budget cuts and the decision not to head to Mars or create a US space station, left NASA without a big hairy goal.
The restricted funding led to the choice of solid rockets boosters for 2 of the external launch engines – the first time they had been used on manned missions. They were perceived as far more dangerous than their liquid fuelled equivalents purely for the fact that once ignited they could not be throttled back or turned off.
We then read about various changes to the basic solid rockets fuel rockets that were admittedly highly reliable for other applications… But these changes just added more complexity and uncertainty that was simply not perceived as the risk it turned out to be. Engineers within the contractors did try to raise the risks, particularly after earlier launches were found to be near misses… But the political pressure to launch meant the risks due to record cold conditions were set aside.
It’s amazing how much millisecond-by-millisecond understanding there is off the ill-fated launch itself. The author summarises the thread of investigation artfully, and pieces together the complex root causes masterfully.
Aside from the obvious sadness for the astronauts, their families and friends, I was left with huge empathy for those who tried and failed to blow the whistle, and the enormous sense of responsibility for the disaster that they forever carried.
