Reviews
Adam Higginbotham's "Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space" offers a gripping account of the 1986 space shuttle disaster. I first learned about this tragedy in film school while watching Koyaanisqatsi for a dissertation. Though born after the event, I remember watching the Columbia disaster live in school, giving me a sense of such tragedies' impact.
The book reveals how preventable the Challenger disaster was, which is devastating to read. It reminded me of my fourth-grade music class, where we sang an inaccurate American song claiming, "We Americans were the first to go to the moon in 1969." This misrepresentation of history feels particularly ironic given the book's exploration of how misinformation contributed to the disaster.
Higginbotham shows how profit and prestige were prioritized over safety, failing the astronauts and their families. Disturbingly, he suggests similar issues persist in aerospace today. While a tough read, the book leaves one hoping that change will eventually come, preventing future tragedies.
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.
