In what might be the least surprising book recommendation in the history of the blog, I thoroughly enjoyed reading a history of the Challenger disaster. This is known; I’m an astronomy nerd, and I’m 50, so I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded, and I dressed up as Ellison Onizuka for some sort of history performance thing later that year that I can’t really remember the details of. I do remember several other people in my class were other Challenger astronauts; I don’t think we had all seven, but there were a good three or four of us, and the thing involved everyone standing around in the gym dressed as their chosen person and giving speeches about our lives and our contributions to society to whoever happened to walk past. A history fair of some kind? Maybe. We finagled matching fake space suits from somewhere, I remember that.
I also set part of the prologue of my book Skylights on January 28, 1986, and the Challenger disaster is what gets the main character interested in space. The book is dedicated to the fourteen astronauts we lost in the Challenger and Columbia explosions, but I had to look up the names of the Columbia astronauts. I have been able to rattle off the seven Challenger astronauts by name since 1986.
The book begins with the Apollo 1 disaster, where the pure-oxygen environment in the cabin caught fire and burned the three astronauts to death before the rocket even took off. Higginbotham then goes into the history of the development of the Space Shuttle, which, my God, was an incredible clusterfuck, and it’s amazing that any of them ever flew at all. There’s a fair amount of attention paid to the process used to select Christa McAuliffe as a payload specialist, some biographical information of each of the other six astronauts, and then once we get to about mid-January of 1986 the book shifts to practically an hour-by-hour description of the run-up to the explosion and the multiple investigations afterwards. Higginbotham is an impressive storyteller– I’m going to find his first book, which was about Chernobyl, as soon as I can– and the book is detailed and authoritative without ever getting dry, with an impressive amount of footnoting at the end for anyone who is interested in checking his sources.
This is– okay, I can’t say objectively, really, but I’m gonna do it anyway– objectively a good book, but it’s also a book that there was no way I was going to be able to put down once I picked it up unless it was an absolute travesty of a hack job, and it won a bunch of awards. I read it in a day, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. I learned some things, and I remembered some other things I’d forgotten, and I’m much angrier at 1980’s era NASA than I was before reading it. None of these people should have died. None of them.
I think a lot of you are like me and knew from the title whether you wanted to read this; I would recommend you follow that impulse if you do, and if your initial impulse wasn’t immediately “This book exists? I should read it!” you should read it anyway. I will talk about it again in December, there is no doubt of that.
