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

I’m a pretty big space geek. I’ve always found it captivating. I was born too late to experience the moon race, but I was born just as the Space Shuttle was starting to take off. I didn’t really know what was going on at that point, but the Challenger disaster occurred a couple of years after I was born. I remember when I started getting into space, my Mom mentioning Challenger, and how it was one of those moments you remember where you were when it happened. I remember it being especially hard for her as a teacher since Christa McAuliffe was on board.

This book is about the Space Shuttle Challenger. But it’s also about the lead up to the disastrous launch, the failings in the design, and most importantly, the failings of leadership to stop it.

The book is well organized. It starts with the decisions from NASA as to what they wanted to do post-Apollo. He does a good job writing about the different design decisions and tradeoffs NASA was sometimes forced to make in order to continue to receive the funding necessary to build the fleet of orbiters. It goes through the progression from the first launch of Columbia in 1981 through the fateful launch of Challenger in 1986. He does a good job describing the issues engineers saw with the shuttle program, and what some tried to do to fix it.

Even knowing what happened, it still surprises me how reckless those in charge were at giving the go ahead to launch on that cold day in January 1986.

It’s a fantastic read and it does a good job talking about the disaster, both about those who made the decision to launch, as well as the engineers who did all they could to stop it from happening.