Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
by Adam Higginbotham
View on GoodreadsAdam Higginbotham's reconstruction of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster — the engineering, the institutional dynamics, the political pressures, and the personal stories of the seven crew members — built on extensive interviews and newly accessed material.
Core ideas
- The O-ring failure was technically anticipated — Morton-Thiokol engineers warned against launch in cold weather the night before — and overridden by managers responding to political and schedule pressure.
- The "normalization of deviance" pattern (Diane Vaughan's term, embraced by Higginbotham): repeated near-misses without failure trained NASA to treat the O-ring erosion as expected rather than alarming, until it wasn't.
- The book's hardest material is the crew-cabin reconstruction — the now-known fact that the crew survived the initial breakup and remained conscious through some or all of the descent, which NASA spent years deflecting.
Published2024
Pages563
ISBN9781982176617
ReadNov 2024
