by In the dying days of World War II, one of Hitler’s most prominent rocket scientists put forward an ambitious plan to strike America. Eugen Sänger’s design, known as the Silbervogel or “Silver Bird”, was part rocket, part spaceship. Shaped like crumpled paper airplanes, it would blast off from Germany and into low earth orbit; from there, it would use its flattened shape to “skip” the denser gases of the inner atmosphere, then bomb New York, before continuing to Japan to refuel, spinning around and attacking Los Angeles on his way back to Berlin – which would put pressure on the entire American continent.
The Silbervogel never moved beyond the graph paper stage. However Sänger’s lofty ambition for a reusable space plane, and his design – an ungainly, nosed craft designed to slow itself down through friction upon return to earth – would become the basis of America’s Space Shuttle program. In the 1960s and 1970s, the graceful spindle-like Apollo rockets took 12 men to the surface of the Moon; by contrast, the Shuttle was expected to take off almost once a week, hauling commercial and military payloads into space and taking journalists and dignitaries on jollies. It was, wrote Adam Higginbotham, “the most complex machine in history” – and, flying to flight, it would be one of the deadliest.
Higginbotham’s superhero Challenger tells the entire tragic arc of the Space Shuttle program. Using the same mix of archival research and interviews that characterized his first book, Midnight in Chernobyl (2019), it is authoritative and immediate – a scrupulous history in which the compulsion to rip off the best reporting.
The heart of Higginbotham’s story is the disaster of January 28, 1986. One minute and 15 seconds after being launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Challenger, one of the program’s five operational craft, disappeared in a huge fireball. It was carrying seven men and a woman on board. Witnesses, watching in person and in front of screens around the world, saw a small streak of smoke lick at one of the rocket boosters; moments later, the entire craft was engulfed in flames. Challenger himself seemed to have disappeared, his team swallowed up in the great blue dome of the sky. Millions were watching on live television. Just over six hours later, US president Ronald Reagan addressed his nation from the Oval Office. It is estimated that 95 percent of Americans had seen the film by the end of that day. The Challenger disaster was a public tragedy second only to the assassination of JFK – and, less than two decades later, 9/11.
Higginbotham forensically demonstrates the cavalcade of cost-cutting and cover-up that preceded Challenger’s destruction. But I found his earlier chapters, which put the Space Shuttle program in context, just as fascinating. He reminds us that the Space Race was never very popular: many in the US government and the general public considered it expensive, wasteful and, above all, pointless. Moreover, its unacceptable iconography – William Anders’ 1968 “Earthrise” photograph, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon in 1969 – failed to convince everyone that it was representative of an America that was become more diverse. African-American writer Gil Scott-Heron’s poem ‘Whitey on the Moon’ took this view: “Was all that money I made last year (for Whitey on the moon?) / How is there no money here? (Hmm! Whitey is on the moon.)” Some made their feelings clear in a simpler way. A month after Armstrong and his crew returned from space, they were at a Hollywood gala attended by then-president Richard Nixon. Protesters hung a flag on a building in front of him. It simply read: “F— MARS.”
As a result of this criticism, NASA resolved to have more diverse crews in the Space Shuttle program. On board the Challenger, that morning in 1986, was Ron McNair, a polymath astronaut who was the second black man in space, and the first musician to be recorded in orbit (with a solo saxophone for a Jean-Michel Jarre album). The Shuttle also had two female crew members: Judy Resnik, a no-nonsense engineer who fought for years for the right to fly, and Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher. McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 participants as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space program, an initiative to open up space travel to civilians. During her time in orbit, she was to give lessons to American children via video link. Among those watching the Challenger launch from Cape Canaveral were 350 students from McAuliffe’s school in New Hampshire, who were flown down to Florida for the event.
Higginbotham explains that there is still little mystery behind Challenger’s destruction. From the beginning, the loading guns are the O-rings, rubber seals inside the rocket booster designed to prevent the highly explosive gases inside from mixing. Built by contractor Morton Thiokol, experts have repeatedly warned that boosters recovered from previous flights showed signs of destructive corrosion in the O-rings. The problem got worse during lower temperatures, and during extreme cold, the rings sometimes fail to seal completely. The temperatures on the pad on the morning of January 28 were the lowest ever recorded before launch. Roger Boisjoy, the Thiokol engineer, insisted – until the night before Challenger’s launch – that it should be established. Fearful of losing their contract, and aware of NASA’s broken timetable, senior managers overrode him.
The Challenger disaster did not stop the Space Shuttle program. It started again 32 months later, when Discovery successfully launched in September 1988, and although Columbia and its seven crew were also lost in 2003, the Shuttle retired when it returned to Earth’s atmosphere after a failure on the thermal protection system, the flights continued until 2011. . But it was January 1986 when the dream of regular government-backed space flight began to die, crushed by arrogance, incompetence and too many bureaucratic bureaucratic push-ups.
In the end, however, the power of Higginbotham’s book lies in its focus not only on that power of American self-reliance, but on the human toll of it. The crew’s dogs were restless as, day after day, they were forced to relive the most painful moments of their lives. When Alison Smith went to the mall to buy an outfit for a souvenir, she was met with silence and strangers laughing in her presence. And weeks after the disaster, June Scobee, the wife of the commander of the Shuttle Dick, would fall out while shopping: she would put her husband’s favorite peanut butter on the trolley, only to realize that no one was home to get it to eat
And in a grim twist, crash investigators in the summer of 1986 determined that – contrary to what was initially assumed – the crew module had not been destroyed immediately. There is every chance that the crew was still alive during their free two and a half minutes into the Atlantic, 18 miles offshore. An examination of the craft’s instrument panel determined that pilot Mike Smith, as he crashed, was trying every procedure he could think of. “He knew he was going to die,” Higginbotham wrote. “But he never stopped trying to live.”
Viking publishes Challenger at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
