Adam Higginbotham

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

Challenger

Mat Connor

An incredible book. The chapters giving the blow-by-blow account of the disaster and the days leading up to the launch are the most riveting I've read in a non-fiction book in a long time. Adam Higginbotham's own Midnight in Chernobyl might actually be the last non-fiction book I found this hard to put down

Higginbotham does an amazing job with these researched dissections of famous disasters. He is the best I've seen at digging into how bureaucracies work and how they sometimes break down. I'm curious to see what he tackles next.

I've always been fascinated with books about astronauts and the Apollo missions. Those books-Apollo: The Race to the Moon, A Man on the Moon, The Right Stuff-are meant to inspire and celebrate human achievement. Higginbotham's book is so important because it focuses on failure and the cost of bureaucratic pressure to make deadlines.

 The awful revelation you learn repeatedly is how foreseeable this disaster was to so many of the people involved. Some of them made an honest effort to recommend against a launch, but their arguments were silenced by bureaucratic pressure, the threat of budget cuts, the failure of risk management protocols, and managers who didn't want to hear bad news. 

There are great lessons to be learned in accounts of human achievement, but I think you learn more when investigating failure.

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

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