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

Adam Higginbotham. Avid Reader, $35 (560p) ISBN 978-1-9821-7661-7

In this captivating 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)