This reading group guide for Challenger includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Adam Higginbotham. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, people around the world held their breath, mourning the loss of the heroic passengers and wondering what this could mean for the future of space travel. In Challenger, Adam Higginbotham unveils not only the finer details of what happened on January 28, but the years of ambition and effort and political struggles that defined NASA and American space travel in the twentieth century. This work of nonfiction reads like a thriller, the narrative both urgent and tender. From the lead-up to the Apollo I disaster to the rescue mission to salvage the remains of Challenger from the Atlantic Ocean, Higginbotham delivers a quintessentially human story of heroism, tragedy, and resilience.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

Why do you think the author chose to focus first on the Apollo I disaster before excavating the lead-up to and aftermath of the Challenger explosion, for which this book is named?

Each member of the Challenger crew is depicted as an individual with a history, likes, dislikes, relationships, etc. Did you feel a sense of emotional intimacy with any of the crewmembers while reading and, if so, how does your new familiarity with the crewmembers lives and relationships affect your interpretation of the Challenger explosion?

Reading about a past occurrence, you already know what is going to happen. However, Higginbotham writes in such a way that keeps the readers on their toes, hopeful that just maybe the January 28, 1986 flight of Challenger would be successful. What about Higginbotham’s writing develops this sense of suspense and hope?

The Teacher in Space program is one of many initiatives the U.S. government took in the twentieth century to diversify the space program, though many astronauts were appalled to know that civilians would be sent into space without the same level of training they’d receive themselves. Are there any more recent programs or initiatives that you believe prize diversity and inclusion and have good intentions but perhaps neglect to acknowledge great risk?

While you read Challenger, did you feel compelled to consume any other media about the passengers and the disaster (articles, YouTube videos, etc.)?

Many engineers at Morton Thiokol, including Bob Ebeling and Robert Boisjoly, tried to prevent Challenger from launching in freezing weather on January 28, 1986. What was your response, as a group, when you discovered that many experts had tried, but failed, to stop the launch?

In the Epilogue, Higginbotham shares what life looked like after Challenger for the family members of the Challenger passengers, as well as the lives of various people involved in the production and launch of Challenger. Why do you think the author chose to share these details? Did this effect any final feelings you had about Challenger, NASA, even bureaucracy, as you finished the book?

If a friend saw you reading this and asked what it’s about, would you say it’s about the space shuttle Challenger, about the multiple mishaps faced in the effort to put Americans in space during the twentieth century, about the politics of the Space Race, or something else altogether?

Do you think the fate of Challenger would have been different if the ship’s January 1984 launch had been postponed?

Were you ever surprised by how intimately and thoughtfully such a technical story (or a story with many technical details) was relayed? Were there any specific moments that solicited an unexpected emotional response from you?

Enhance your Book Club

Talk to each other about what you remember about the day Challenger exploded or, if you weren’t born yet, ask loved ones what they remember. Discuss the role memory plays when looking back at tragic events.

Watch this [linked] clip of Richard Feynman criticizing NASA during the Challenger accident hearing, and consider this particular line: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Together, make a list of the advantages and disadvantages our society is afforded by having so much recent history available online, summoned instantly with the simple touch of a finger to a screen.

Make a list of the lessons you have learned, and the wisdom you have gained as a group in reading Challenger, paying special attention to the value of a true story that contains tragedy and resilience. Then, make a list of other works of nonfiction you might read that are a testament to humanity’s strength in challenging times.

An Interview with the Author

For many people, the Challenger disaster—like President Kennedy’s assassination, which preceded it, and 9/11, which came after it—remains a moment where one can describe exactly where one was when it happened. Where were you, and what do you remember of that day?

I was seventeen in January 1986, and had been fascinated by the space program for as long as I could remember—and even before that; my parents woke me to witness the first moon landing when I was 13 months old. I was in high school in England when the accident happened and, because of the time difference, it was already late in the day when the news broke. I had gone out for the evening with my friends and didn’t find out what had happened until I returned home that night. But I remember clearly how impossible to comprehend it seemed.

The tragedy of the Challenger was not NASA’s first calamity, nor was it its last. What came beforehand and what came after, and what’s distinct about the Challenger?

There had been several deaths among the astronaut corps before 1986, both in flying accidents and, most devastatingly, as a result of the fire on the launchpad during training for the first manned mission of the moon program. But NASA and its contractors seemed to learn important safety lessons from the Apollo 1 tragedy. Subsequent close calls, including the miraculous rescue of the crew of Apollo 13, encouraged a belief that the agency could routinely achieve the impossible, and—armed with audacity and ingenuity—its engineers could always beat the odds. That illusion was shattered by the loss of Challenger, and the culture of NASA was changed forever—or so it seemed.

This book is full of heroics (and the opposite). Who are some of the more memorable heroes of this book?

Each of the men and women who volunteered to fly aboard the space shuttle displayed extraordinary courage—and perhaps none more than John Young and Bob Crippen, who sat at the controls for the first shuttle launch in 1981, when it had only been tested in theory, and senior NASA managers weren’t even certain it would fly—“the boldest test flight in history.” But two of the rocket engineers who tried to stop the fatal launch of Challenger the night before its final flight— Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly—were heroes of a different kind. After the accident happened, they fought an attempted cover-up and brought the truth to light at what would turn out to be great personal cost.

The Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral, but there are many theaters in this book spread across the country and even around the world. What are some of the important places in this book?

The events in the story span the United States from coast to coast—from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Morton Thiokol rocket factory in Utah to Mission Control in Houston and the launchpads at the Cape, and from Huntsville, Alabama to Concord, Massachusetts. Just as the effort to put a man on the moon had been, the Space Shuttle program was a national undertaking. But the Challenger accident—relayed live by NASA TV into thousands of school classrooms as it happened—united the country in real time like few events before or since.

Of all the technological feats and marvels that made the space program feasible, what are some of the innovations that most amaze you?

One of the amazing achievements overshadowed by the disaster is that the space shuttle itself was an astonishing feat of engineering—conceived as the most complicated machine ever built. Bob Sieck, whose job it was to deliver Challenger to the pad at Cape Canaveral, ready for launch, told me that the spacecraft was an order of magnitude more complex than the rockets that took men to the moon. In some ways the technology NASA is now using to fly into space is a step backwards—and many engineers, and astronauts who flew the shuttle, believe it was retired long before its time.

When most people remember the Challenger disaster, they tend to think of Christa McAuliffe—the first teacher selected to go into space. But the rest of the crew had fascinating back stories and paths to the ship that day. Who were some of those people?

The crew included Ron McNair, a jazz-playing karate expert with a doctorate in physics from MIT who grew up picking cotton in the fields near his boyhood home in South Carolina; Judy Resnik, a gifted engineer who narrowly missed becoming the first American woman in space, in part because—intensely private—she so detested the public relations parts of an astronaut’s job; Hawaiian-born Ellison Onizuka, the first Japanese-American in space; mission commander Dick Scobee, who began his career as a flight-line mechanic fixing propellor engines in the Air Force and rose through the ranks to become an officer and test pilot; and Greg Jarvis, a civilian satellite specialist fascinated with the space program, who was assigned to the crew as part of a deal NASA had with the Hughes Corporation, one of the agency’s major commercial customers, to fly two of its engineers aboard the shuttle.

The crew was diverse: Judy Resnik and Christa McAuliffe were women; Ron McNair was a Black man; Ellison Onizuka was Japanese-American. How did NASA assemble the crew, and in what ways did they prioritize the backgrounds of the seven astronauts? And what did it take to qualify?

McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, and commander Dick Scobee were all members of the group of thirty-five new astronauts selected by NASA in 1978—the first time the agency had ever admitted women or minorities to the astronaut corps—and handpicked from a total of around 8,000 applicants to fly aboard the space shuttle. Christa McAuliffe was chosen from a total of more than 11,000 educators from across the United States who applied to the Teacher in Space program. But the individual crews were assembled by the Director of Flight Operations, George Abbey, a powerful and mysterious figure inside NASA, whose decisions some astronauts suspected were guided by personal favoritism. But Abbey always insisted he chose crews based upon the needs of the mission—and by the time Challenger launched, Resnik, McNair, Onizuka, and Scobee had each already flown in space once; the pilot, Mike Smith, was a rookie astronaut but, although one of the most accomplished pilots in his class—and especially close to Abbey—he had been waiting to fly for five years. Greg Jarvis had trained for two previous missions and even appeared in the official portraits with their crews but had been bumped from his seat both times by politicians who wanted to go into orbit as “congressional observers.” He was finally assigned to Challenger barely two months before the launch date.

NASA allowed the astronauts to bring some personal effects on board. What did some of the astronauts bring along? Were they barred from bringing anything?

Each of the Challenger crew was accompanied on their voyage by a Personal Preference Kit, containing small items they were carrying into space to bring back to friends and relatives as souvenirs of the mission, which were screened and weighed by NASA technicians before being wrapped and sealed for flight: Judy Resnik’s kit contained a Dunhill lighter she was carrying on behalf of her high school boyfriend; Onizuka had packed a deflated soccer ball signed by the girls on his daughter’s team. Ron McNair had also been granted permission to take his small soprano saxophone into orbit with him; he had spent months practicing a jazz piece the French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre had written specially for him, and which he planned to record in space. Shortly before takeoff, the permission was withdrawn, and McNair was forced to leave his instrument behind when he left for the pad.

In what ways did both NASA’s organizational structure and its institutional need for good public relations contribute to the accident?

Since its inception, NASA had been subdivided into separate semiautonomous facilities scattered across the country, each with its own distinct culture—and competing with one another for projects, responsibilities, and the share of the agency budget that went with them. This competition was particularly intense between the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, which oversaw the design and manufacture of the shuttle’s engines and solid rocket boosters, and the Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, responsible for overall management of the shuttle system, and where the astronauts worked and trained. The managers in Alabama had developed a reputation for insularity and secrecy and a reluctance to share bad news with outsiders, and they failed to pass on key information about failures in the rocket boosters to senior managers at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. The public adulation the agency garnered from its first successes in the early 1960s—and the epic spectacle of the moon landings—helped convince generations of agency chiefs that such audacious, news-making technological leaps were essential to maintain popular support for NASA and, in turn, the congressional funding that made them possible. But by the beginning of 1986, the public had begun to lose interest in the shuttle—and launch delays and engineering failures started to dominate the headlines. With the Teacher in Space initiative, public fascination with the space program once more approached previous heights; but the snafus and schedule delays continued, tightening the financial squeeze on the agency and adding pressure to get Challenger off the ground—an outbreak of what old hands in Houston called “‘go’ fever.”

Is Challenger a cautionary tale? And, if so, in what ways?

It’s a story rooted in hubris and complacency, and shares many of the lessons of other disasters caused by mankind’s overconfidence in being able to tame the forces of nature with technology—like the sinking of the Titanic and the Chernobyl accident. Institutionally, NASA had become accustomed to achieving the seemingly impossible, and the early success of the shuttle program served to bolster an unspoken but dangerous conviction—among both engineers and astronauts—that the agency was infallible. This encouraged a subtly mounting tolerance for risk, even as new faults were discovered in the shuttle and chronic problems went unresolved—a concept that the sociologist Diane Vaughan called “the normalization of deviance.” When combined with the political, commercial, and public-relations pressure on the agency to keep flying, in retrospect it’s clear that an accident was all but inevitable.

How did the disaster change NASA? Does this story still resonate in the minds of NASA engineers and technicians?

The accident changed both NASA and its contractors profoundly, in ways large and small. Throughout the agency—from crane operators at Cape Canaveral to astronauts in Houston—thousands of individuals felt the loss of Challenger and her crew personally; at the memorial held at the Johnson Space Center less than a week after the accident, hardened test pilots wept in their seats. Once the investigation began, almost all the senior managers involved in the decision to launch Challenger resigned or were dismissed or reassigned, and the agency began a wide-ranging overhaul of the shuttle program that lasted almost two years, and made changes to the spacecraft’s design, engineering, safety protocols, and management. To ensure that the lessons of Challenger are never forgotten, NASA established the Apollo, Challenger, Columbia, Lessons Learned Program, which seeks to use the failures common to the agency’s three most infamous accidents to educate new generations of engineers and managers.

Were the bodies of those on board recovered? And is there a memorial to the astronauts who perished aboard Challenger?

The effort to find the remains of Challenger and her crew lasted for a total of almost seven months in 1986, in what became the largest salvage operation in US Navy history. The effort to locate the bodies was shrouded in secrecy and took place under the gaze of the international media—but eventually resulted in the remains of all seven astronauts being brought up from the Atlantic and flown home to their families. Those remains raised from the wreckage that could not be identified were buried together beneath a joint memorial at Arlington National Cemetery—but the families chose to establish an educational foundation, the Challenger Learning Center, in the place of a larger physical monument to the crew.

What did the Rogers Commission, the presidential commission that issued a report to President Reagan just five months after the disaster, reveal?

Drawing heavily on the testimony of Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, the report was damning. The commission found failure and incompetence throughout NASA—including poor engineering and design, bad communication, and neglected safety checks—and singled out the managers of the Marshall Space Flight Center for particular censure. Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman issued his own appendix to the main report, which went even further in its criticism: he believed that the agency had betrayed the very principles on which it had been founded and told reporters that its managers had exaggerated the reliability of the shuttle “to the point of fantasy.”

The O-rings in the rocket boosters were a source of anxiety for NASA and its contractors before the launch. It’s easy to see those failures as likely and even inevitable in hindsight, but was there willful blindness on the part of the engineers and directors who allowed the launch to proceed?

At the time the Rogers Commission published its findings, there were many people who believed that those responsible for the solid rockets in Huntsville should have been charged with criminal negligence in the deaths of the Challenger crew. But I don’t believe those men—including Marshall Center Director William R. Lucas and Solid Rocket Program Manager Larry Mulloy—consciously sent seven men and women to their deaths. They were arrogant, certainly, knew that they were taking a gamble by pressing ahead with the launch of Challenger on the morning of January 28, 1986, and may even have misled the investigators about their role in the fatal launch decision process. But they both testified about their decisions and discussed them at length in the years after the accident, and the evidence suggests that chief among those people they had fooled were themselves. By the day of the launch, Lucas and Mulloy had convinced themselves that they fully understood the engineering limitations of their rockets, had accurately weighed the relative risks of choosing to fly, and that their decision to launch was based upon the best information available. They were wrong.

What did it take to research, report, and write this book?

A lot has been written about Challenger, but much of it has examined the accident from an academic perspective as an example of institutional failure or concentrated on the story of Christa McAuliffe. I wanted to tell the story in a different way—one that showed not only what a triumph of engineering and an important symbol of American technological prowess the shuttle was before it became overshadowed by what happened, but one that described the extraordinary lives of each of the seven members of the crew in detail. To do that, I conducted almost 100 interviews, with the family and friends of the Challenger astronauts and with their colleagues from the Astronaut Office who flew the early shuttle missions; with engineers who worked on the design of the spacecraft at the outset and the technicians who helped build it in California and Florida; with console operators from Mission Control; with former agency chiefs and managers; with those who witnessed the accident and investigated it afterward; with members of the Rogers Commission; and with seamen and divers who recovered the wreckage from the Atlantic in the winter of 1986.

Along with the recollections of these men and women, I used memoirs, diaries, newspaper archives, photographs, and video recorded at the time to re-create the scenes central to the narrative of the book; I visited each of the sites where the events took place, from the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah to the rocket engine test stands in the swamps of Mississippi, to better understand what it was like to live and work there as the shuttle program reached its peak. Finally, I spent years mining the thousands of pages of documents I gathered from NASA records, from the National Archives and the National Air and Space Museum, and discovered a wealth of new material, including an unpublished memoir by Roger Boisjoly, among a collection of his personal papers from the time, that helped me tell the story from the inside—from the perspective of rocket engineers and program managers, the astronauts and their families, and the men who issued the final instruction to launch.

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (May 14, 2024)
• Length: 576 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982176631