Challenger: An American Tragedy: The Inside Story from Launch Control by Hugh Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The end of January seems the cruelest time of the year, to me. This year, we were deep in the polar vortex. Five years ago, it was at the end of January when my wife received a cancer diagnosis. In 1978, the end of January brought the blizzard of ’78 to the Midwest that stranded me for five days in Bowling Green, Ohio. And January 28, 1986 was another cruel day, as seven astronauts including our first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe, died in the Challenger disaster.
The memory of that day is burned into the minds of boomers and GenXers. We still can see the image of a huge explosion with two diverging trails as the solid rocket boosters continue on their own. We remember the closeups that show the fiery gases burning through the right solid rocket booster joint at the same moment as Commander Dick Scobie confirmed, “Roger, go at throttle up”. At 73 seconds, the main fuel tank exploded and the whole launch vehicle began to disintegrate.
At 58.778 seconds into powered flight, a large flame plume is visible just above the SRB exhaust nozzle indicating a breach in the motor casing.
This brief account by Hugh Harris, know as “the voice of NASA” during most of the shuttle missions gives what I would call a bare-bones account of these events. We don’t get biographies of each of the astronauts. We don’t get moment-by-moment minutiae of the launch countdown. We don’t see in detail all the discussions between Morton Thiokol, the maker of the solid rocket booster, and NASA about launch safety. We only get hints of the management structure that led to key figures not getting the key information that would lead them to cancel a mission for safety reasons. We do not get highly technical discussions of the O-ring and joint failure that led to fuel burn-through. Nor do we get gory speculation about how the astronauts died. On this last he simply quotes a report indicating inconclusive findings that did leave open the possibility that they were alive after the explosion but couldn’t have survived the ocean impact.
What we do get is an eyewitness account of what things were like that morning–the cold weather, the ice on the launch structure, the previous delays, the final preparations for launch, the first 73 seconds, the explosion and its aftermath–search and rescue, NASA’s frantic efforts to understand what went wrong, the commission hearings, and the rebuilding program that followed. Nearly all of it was familiar to me but it is the perfect account for someone who wants to understand the basic outlines of what happened and why and how NASA responded.
Perhaps the most telling moment was during hearings when noted physicist Richard Feynman simplified the complex discussions about whether the O-rings were responsible by taking a piece of O-ring material in a C-clamp, submerging it in ice water, and then showing its inability to return to its initial form. Temperatures the morning of the launch reached 20 degrees Farenheit.
Most chilling was to see the “russian roulette” thinking that led to failure to address the O-ring problems despite previous partial burn throughs. In the past, secondary O-rings contained it and so the thinking developed, that if it didn’t happen before, it wouldn’t this time. The irony was that NASA didn’t learn. On the first shuttle flight after the disaster, Discovery showed evidence of damage from insulation that compromised the heat absorbing tiles on the wing surfaces, the same type of damage that led to the break up of Columbia in re-entry in 2003.
So, for the NASA geek or disaster lover, this is probably not enough. But if you want to get more than a Wikipedia article summary of the disaster, this is a well-written eyewitness account that covers the basic ground.