A preventable tragedy revisited
Journalist Adam Higginbotham has written an extensive, bolt-bybolt history of the Space Shuttle program, and at 450 pages, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” is as complex as a spacecraft itself.
Central to his story is the destruction of the Challenger 72 seconds after its launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 28, 1986. This mission, heralded as sending the first civilian into space, teacher Christa McAuliffe, was one of 15 set for that year including the installation of the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA was under pressure to keep to its schedule.
Six other astronauts died in the “major malfunction,” the fatal accident that was avoidable, but as Higginbotham proves, drawing on recently disclosed documents, shuttle management kept loosening safety standards.
“Incrementally, they began to accept as normal problems that deviated dangerously from the original design standards,” Higginbotham writes.
On Feb. 3, seven days after the Challenger disaster, President Ronald Reagan formed a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, blocking NASA from looking into it and grounding the fleet. Known as the Rogers commission, named for its chairman William Rogers, former secretary of state and U.S. attorney general, the panel was given 120 days to reach a conclusion.
Among its 12 members were astronauts Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong, Air Force Gen. Dan Kutyna and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, a physicist. Feynman demonstrated in a public hearing the cause of the explosion by putting a chunk of the rubber gasket used to seal the joints in the shuttle’s solid fuel booster into ice water. The gasket lost flexibility.
NASA’s tight schedule pushed it to launch Challenger in unusually frigid temperatures, despite concerns from some scientists for the booster manufacturer that the seals wouldn’t function in the cold. And one of them didn’t, allowing 6,000-degree plasma to escape, sending the spacecraft to its fiery destruction.
The commission was frank in its findings: “The accident had not simply been a technical failure after all; it was human error of the most shocking kind,” Higginbotham writes. Rogers “suspected the entire launch approval process had failed.”
The chairman wrapped up the public hearings a month after the Challenger failure, labeling the booster maker, Morton Thiokol, and NASA “guilty of a pattern of mismanagement and miscommunication at the highest levels.” He added that officials had “overlooked a litany of clear warnings.”
The investigation didn’t stop there. A team of FBI agents, National Transportation Safety Board investigators and astronauts worked for months, graduallyundermining NASA and worrying the Reagan administration.
“Disquieting revelations were now spilling steadily into the media,” writes Higginbotham, “with new and more pernicious details emerging all the time, just as it had during Watergate. There was no telling when it would end.”
On March 7, 1986, the remains of the Challenger crew were found in nearly 90 feet of water and 18 miles from the launch site. In the author’s account, the discovery was grisly and shocking even to veteran divers. The debris search, costing $1 million a day, ended in August with the evidence — the booster section that caused the accident.
Nearly three years and many damaged careers later, the Shuttle Discovery with redesigned boosters and a simple escape system launched successfully and the program went on, logging 87 missions.
“A new generation of NASA management grew even more confident of their abilities,” writes Higginbotham. “Slowly, insidiously, some of the old ways and attitudes became reestablished...; others had never really gone away.”
The Space Shuttle program ended in 2011 after 135 missions to outer space. Two of those missions ended in disaster — the explosion of the Challenger in 1986, and the re-entry failure of the Columbia, Feb. 1, 2003.
The destruction of Columbia, caused by another unaddressed NASA concern about the fragile ceramic heat shields, some which fell off at launch, should be the subject of another book. In the meantime, “Challenger” provides readers with plenty to think about, thanks to its author’s wide-ranging, thorough efforts.