Flying Blind

Flying Blind

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster, Adam Higginbotham, Simon and Shuster, pp 576, reviewed by Bill Hartley

Governments can’t resist projects on a gargantuan scale and when they go wrong the disaster is of a magnitude to match the distorted ambition. Author Adam Higginbotham has already covered this ground to great effect with his 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl. In Challenger, Higginbotham turns his attention to the Space Shuttle disaster of 1986. The image of the booster rockets separating from the craft is one of the indelible pictures of the last century. Told at a rapid pace, the reader is taken inexorably to the awful conclusion. Despite the story being well known, there is no sense of anti climax.

People of a certain age will recall the US – Soviet battle for supremacy in space. With the USSR being first to get a man into orbit, President Kennedy laid down the challenge (and the budget) to reach the moon before the end of the decade. NASA had been used to gobbling up huge sums of American taxpayer’s money but following the moon landing the public grew tired of space travel and TV networks were no longer routinely covering launches. NASA needed something (and someone) to recapture the imagination of the public.

With politicians beginning to wonder if space travel involving humans was worth the money, NASA came up with its new idea, the reusable spacecraft or shuttle. Unfortunately, the concept was born amidst something the organisation had never dealt with before, a limited budget. Higginbotham humanises the story. Space travel is inherently dangerous and the job was originally entrusted to dashing former test pilots like Colonel John Glenn. These men were put through all the rigours of pre-flight training, such as sensory deprivation tanks which involved hours underwater and the ghastly centrifuge which treated them like ingredients in a blender.

Amidst the wealth of technical detail presented in a readable way, what stands out is the development of the booster rockets, essential for getting the shuttle off the launch pad and into orbit. Budget cuts meant they were to be powered by solid fuel. Wehrner Von Braun, no less, had considered them too dangerous to be used for putting humans into space but they were cheaper than liquid fuelled rockets. The downside was that they couldn’t be turned off. This is the thread which runs through the story: cost cutting whilst working at the frontiers of technology. For example, the rockets were never tested vertically, again to save money. Crammed with volatile fuel they weighed 590 tons and presented incredible engineering challenges.

The author juxtaposes the engineering problems with the public relations aspect. Inevitably what captured the interest of the media was the crew. Previous NASA astronauts were from much the same background. Now word went out that the Shuttle’s crew would be more diverse. Higginbotham effectively sketches in the back stories of the people chosen. These are individuals the reader gets to know; the minutiae of their lives and relationships add a special poignancy to the story. They weren’t earning much either. An estate agent told one house hunting astronaut ‘a welder makes more than that’.

The Shuttle was the most complex machine ever built and perhaps chief among the many problems faced by its designers was the question of the heat shield tiles, there to protect the ship from the high temperatures to be encountered on re-entry. Each was unique, since flat tiles wouldn’t stick to the curved surfaces of the Shuttle. Failure of only one could have led to the immolation of the ship.

With talk of space travel now being within reach of ordinary people, the task of recruiting a new breed of astronaut sought to reflect this. The author describes the selection process and how, in a PR coup, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was chosen. The NASA test pilot old guard had their doubts about a woman among the crew with no special qualifications. She had been chosen to live out the daydreams of the many people who’d written to NASA. Kids love space travel, so what could be better than having a teacher present lessons from up there?

As NASA moved towards launch, delays and cancellations prompted media scepticism. With an eye on the political paymasters, management pressure from the top began to override the concerns of engineers. A Germanic hierarchical management structure bequeathed by Von Braun made it difficult for them to be heard. Arrogance, bullying and mismanagement weren’t the exclusive province of a Soviet totalitarian regime, revealed after Chernobyl. Ultimately the decision to launch was a dangerous compromise. As a NASA boss said, ‘otherwise we’re going to lose the programme’.

The author’s description of the final days before launch unfolds like a tragedy. Engineers from the company which built the booster rockets bravely opposed the decision to launch, often against the wishes of their own senior management, anxious to keep the contract. NASA officials applied further pressure to secure an agreement that it was possible to go ahead in icy temperatures (a supposedly once in a 100 year meteorological phenomenon which had nearly destroyed a mission the previous year). Higginbotham succeeds in creating an emotional experience, despite the reader being aware of what is to come.

Ultimately technical failures caused the loss of the Shuttle but Christa McAuliffe and her crew mates were sacrificed by flawed management and bad decision making. The final part of the book covers the aftermath and there is much to tell. Higginbotham maintains the interest post disaster, as the reader discovers what happened to the families of the crew and the engineers who had to live with the guilt. As someone noted after the inquiry, ‘reality must take precedence over public relations’.

William Hartley is a Social Historian