How Disasters Happen --- Rules were observed, protocols followed and Challenger was given the go-ahead for launch. Yet it was known that, in the cold, its O-rings might cause trouble. They did.

"Challenger

By Adam Higginbotham

Avid Reader, 576 pages, $35

It was so cold on the night of Jan. 27, 1986, that officials at Florida's Kennedy Space Center feared the water pipes on the space shuttle launchpad would freeze. To protect the plumbing, they decided to keep the water trickling through the pad's sprinkler system. By dawn, the gantry was festooned with icicles, like "something out of Dr. Zhivago," one observer said.

The risk of falling ice was one of several reasons to delay the launch of the space shuttle Challenger on that frigid morning. But the countdown proceeded. Then, 73 seconds into the flight, Challenger exploded, sending its seven crew members -- including "teacher in space" Christa McAuliffe -- on a fatal plunge into the sea.

As with the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, people would remember where they were when they heard of Challenger's fate. More broadly, Challenger would join the loss of the Titanic and the Chernobyl nuclear power-plant disaster as an iconic example of how technological complexity and human overconfidence can combine in catastrophe.

It is a story ripe for re-examination, and Adam Higginbotham, author of the gripping "Midnight in Chernobyl" (2019), is well suited to the task. Mr. Higginbotham tells how the space shuttle was conceived on the cusp of the 1970s, during the waning days of NASA's Apollo program. With the moon landing behind them, NASA officials recognized that sending astronauts into space perched atop massive, single-use rockets was becoming less feasible. The days of bountiful Cold War budgets were ending. The space agency needed a more affordable, and versatile, pathway to space.

NASA settled on the concept of a large space plane: a winged vehicle that could launch under its own power (aided by two detachable booster rockets), spend long stretches in orbit and then re-enter Earth's atmosphere, glide to a landing and be prepped for another flight within days. The idea was to build a "true spacefaring vessel," Mr. Higginbotham writes. But at a time of shrinking budgets -- and fading interest in spaceflight -- NASA chose to sell the program to Congress and the Nixon White House as "a thrifty and reusable space truck."

Once in service, the shuttle proved instead to be a temperamental beast. The spacecraft's skin of heat-proof tiles required constant repairs. Reconditioning the multiple shuttle orbiters for repeat flights took weeks or months rather than days. The launch schedule slipped while costs soared. But NASA pressed on, hoping that the gap between promises and reality would close if the agency could somehow increase the pace of launches.

Mr. Higginbotham's narrative takes its time moving toward the tragic climax. Along the way, we get to know the NASA leaders trying to keep the shuttle program funded in Washington, the diverse crew of the Challenger mission (one reporter described McAuliffe as having "the gee-whiz bounce of a camp counsellor") and the key decision makers who would ultimately approve the launch.

At its heart, the tragedy of Challenger is a story of managerial failure. Mr. Higginbotham methodically reveals how NASA's ability to manage risk began eroding even before the first shuttle launch in 1981. The shuttle's solid-fuel rocket boosters -- tall metal tubes packed with fast-burning, rubberlike fuel -- were not the most complex component in the launch system, but they proved insidiously troublesome. Morton Thiokol, a Utah company, manufactured the boosters in segments, which were designed to be shipped across the country before being stacked together at the Kennedy Space Center.

But when Morton Thiokol engineers test-fired the assembled booster, they made an alarming discovery: The joints between some segments occasionally leaked. Tests showed that the enormous pressure of ignition sometimes pushed hot gasses past the first of two rubber O-rings sealing the joint. If a jet of hot gas were ever to make it past both O-rings, the author writes, "it could quickly eat through the half-inch steel casing of the rocket like a monstrous blowtorch."

The engineers didn't ignore this irregularity. Instead they studied it and determined that, after momentarily leaking, the primary O-ring was quickly forced into the gap and the leaks stopped. While this wasn't how the joint was designed to operate, the engineers came to see the anomaly as understandable, predictable and ultimately acceptable. The sociologist Diane Vaughan, in her influential 1996 book, "The Challenger Launch Decision," would dub this process the "normalization of deviance." In the history of the space shuttle, this creeping acceptance of potentially deadly problems would happen time and again.

When the first space shuttle, Columbia, thundered into the sky in 1981, the press and public were captivated. America was back in space! But as the shuttle flights went on, problems with leaky booster joints continued. One of the worst cases occurred in 1985, during a launch in abnormally cold weather. A small group of worried Morton Thiokol employees began lobbying for major changes in the joint design. But midlevel NASA engineers, having repeatedly studied the issue, decided that the problem, now well understood, was manageable. Each successful flight seemed to confirm that conclusion; the O-ring concerns were never passed up the ladder to top NASA management.

Mr. Higginbotham's prose grows taut as the Challenger liftoff approaches. On Jan. 27, 1986, with the launch set for the following morning, Morton Thiokol's anxious engineers were alarmed. The forecast called for temperatures well below freezing. They believed that such extreme cold would make the O-rings stiff and slow to seal. Morton Thiokol executives called for a last-minute phone conference with their NASA counterparts.

To the engineers who'd raised the alarm, the risks seemed obvious. But NASA's official Flight Readiness Review ran on a strict protocol. A decision to launch required concrete data, but so did a decision not to launch. After the Morton Thiokol engineers made their rushed presentation, Larry Mulloy, NASA's project manager for solid-fuel boosters, came on the line. He noted that O-ring problems didn't always correlate with temperature in previous launches; the data appeared to be inconclusive. NASA didn't scrub missions based on hunches. Ultimately the countdown proceeded.

In the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, the White House, Congress and the public wanted to know who was to blame. The Reagan administration appointed William Rogers, a former secretary of state, to lead an investigative commission. The group's dramatic hearings, which began in February 1986, made the nightly news. Everyone seemed to agree on the culprit: reckless NASA leaders who rolled the dice with astronauts' lives in their effort to keep up with an unrealistic launch schedule. The Rogers Commission report generally supported this view.

Diane Vaughan, in her study of the disaster, argued that the search for an "amoral calculator" -- a leader who knowingly violates safety rules -- is too simplistic. In fact, Mulloy and others who approved the launch believed they were adhering to proper procedures. "Following the rules, doing their job," she writes, "they made a disastrous decision."

None of this excuses NASA's terrible judgment, which Mr. Higginbotham so dramatically documents. But Ms. Vaughan's contrarian view adds nuance to our understanding of this and other disasters. It's tempting to assume that if we were in a risky enterprise we would spot the danger and raise the alarm. But the study of disasters shows that such assumptions are too easy. In any organization, the pressure to normalize deviance is strong; even the best-intentioned managers succumb to groupthink; and rules too rigidly followed can make it hard to cope with contingencies. Unfortunately, Ms. Vaughan's insights are consigned mostly to footnotes in "Challenger." They could have added even more depth to Mr. Higginbotham's rich story.

NASA didn't learn the proper lessons from the Challenger disaster. In 2003, 17 years after that accident, space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere. The postmortem revealed that, once again, the agency had learned to tolerate a chronic problem, in this case damage to the craft's delicate insulating tiles. Mr. Higginbotham appropriately ends his long, moving narrative on that downbeat note. NASA today -- still struggling to build a sustainable program for manned space exploration -- has yet to fully recover from its twin shuttle tragedies.

---

Mr. Meigs is the former editor of Popular Mechanics and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: How Disasters Happen --- Rules were observed, protocols followed and Challenger was given the go-ahead for launch. Yet it was known that, in the cold, its O-rings might cause trouble. They did. Meigs, James B.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 May 2024: C.7.