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

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

by Adam Higginbotham

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History & Foreign Affairs

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, and the story usually stops at the booster O-rings. Higginbotham shows you the institutional failure behind them: engineers warned that freezing temperatures threatened those seals, and NASA managers under schedule, cost and political pressure launched anyway.

Core ideas
  • Warnings overruled: Morton Thiokol engineers including Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly tried to stop the launch and were overruled, a story drawn partly from Boisjoly's unpublished memoir.
  • Normalization of deviance: Borrowing sociologist Diane Vaughan's concept, the book traces how NASA's tolerance for risk rose each time an earlier flight succeeded.
  • Seven people: Profiles run from Dick Scobee, an Air Force mechanic turned test pilot, to teacher Christa McAuliffe, and a seven-month Atlantic salvage recovered the crew's remains.
Published2024
Pages563
ISBN9781982176617
ReadNov 2024

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