The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster gripped the nation. On January 28,1986, just 73 seconds after launch, the Space Shuttle broke apart over the Atlantic. All seven astronauts were killed.
It was a moment that stunned the nation and the first time a U.S. spacecraft experienced the loss of crew in-flight. President Ronald Regan addressed the nation that evening.
“We'd never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we’ve forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle,” Regan said in an Oval Office address. “But they the Challenger seven were aware of the dangers and overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes, Michael Smith, next Kobe, Judah the Resnick, Ronald McNair, Ellison, Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.”
In his new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, author and journalist Adam Higginbotham dives deep into at the investigation of the accident and the lives of those involved. Higginbotham said he remembers the day of the challenger accident vividly.
“I remember very clearly how incomprehensible I found it, and how I struggled to believe that such a thing was possible,” Higginbotham said. “Because up until that point, NASA had got an apparently seamless record of achieving the almost impossible on a regular basis. So, it was it was at the front of my mind when I sat down to start thinking about ideas for the writing the second book.”
An investigation found O-rings on the solid rocket boosters were to blame – despite engineers raising the alarm ahead of that cold-morning launch. The challenger launched just a year after the Shuttle Discovery launched during the coldest weather in Florida history.
“The reason that it didn't seem like they were going to launch and the reason that many of the astronauts on the Challenger crew went to the launch pad that morning thinking that they were going to be facing another scrub, and that the launch would be postponed until later in the week was because the weather was extremely cold,” Higginbotham said. “It was one of the coldest days in Florida history. And one of the specific reasons that this seemed poor weather in which to launch was that almost exactly a year before. In January 1985.”
Higginbotham said that this crew showed great heroism to climb aboard a vehicle that was headed into space. He said his inspiration for writing the novel was to tell it from a different, heroic perspective.
“One of the reasons that I wanted to write this book in the first place was because I felt that a lot of the way that the story has been told in the past has rested on the idea that the crew of Challenger, not just Kristen McAuliffe, but all the other six members of the crew went in some ways ignorantly to their death,” Higginbotham said. “And they were the victim of a risky spacecraft that they really didn't understand the complexities. But the truth is that all of them, including McAuliffe, understood all too well, that flying an experimental spacecraft into orbit was fraught with danger.”
