(BNS) The Challenger Disaster

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Could the Challenger disaster have been avoided? Why was the space shuttle program almost canceled so many times? And is there a Mandela effect here? Do you really actually remember watching the Challenger explode? Today, Rad, 80s, 90s history is looking at the Challenger disaster. Welcome to RAD, 80s, 90s history, a podcast looking at the last two decades of the 20th century. I'm your host, Brian McCullough.

I say it's a history of the last time things were relatively normal and chill, but today we're going to be talking about something that was definitely not chill, and in fact might maybe be the emblematic traumatic news event for folks who grew up in the 1980s.

To talk about this today, my special guest is Farhad Manju. Farhad has been a New York Times columnist. I mean, he's been a columnist as long as I've been reading people on the Internet slate all over the place. Farhad, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really look forward to this. Do you remember where you were when the Challenger blew up, by the way? There's definitely...

Mandela effect there, because I was actually in South Africa, which is where I'm from. And I came here, we came here like two years after the Challenger exploded. But, and so I can't imagine... I have a distinct memory of watching it in a classroom, but I don't think that actually happened because I don't think we would have watched it in South Africa.

Please save that because I have done a little research into that and I have a theory about that. OK. So, yeah, I mean I know what that iconic picture looks like and I've seen the video. But I – I do have a memory that may be a false memory of actually watching it. I was in the second grade and I confirmed this with my mother because she was a teacher at my school. I said.

I wasn't watching it, right? She said, no, I took you out of class and I told you about it. So, like I said, we're going to get into that. But actually... When I reached out to you to see if you do an episode for this show, you mentioned that you had just read a book. which I had just read, which is called Challenger, A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham. It was a pretty amazing book, right?

Yeah, it was so good. I read his book about Chernobyl, which he wrote right before this. And I was like blown away in that book about... All of the details he had and then the details in this are even sort of – it's amazing. It's sort of like amazing journalism but also just like really interesting stuff about science and like how America worked. It's just great.

bureaucracy for both of those stories you know a lot of that is you know the the cover your ass stuff and the why did you make this decision stuff and um so to get into it in a weird way i feel like we're going to spend half our time talking about the, the space shuttle program itself, or maybe even the space program itself, because in a way this is sort of.

You know, it leads up to this disaster. But the story here, we could start with just, you know, the moon landing. 1969, a decade's worth of work. Kennedy, the space race, the Apollo program. The, you know, the iconic images of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, hopping around, playing golf on the moon and things like that. The entire space program was huge, especially in the 60s. NASA had some 400,000 people.

Working on the Apollo program at its height, the price of the support facilities alone was $2.2 billion. The total... cost to the country to put people on the moon, the entire Apollo program was $28 billion, which was... the equivalent of a third of all of the U.S. military spending for 1969, which— was the height of the Vietnam War. So it wasn't a third of all of the military spending on the Vietnam War, but it was a third of spending of probably one of the, you know.

prime years of the Vietnam War. Yeah. And it was, I mean, I think the reason it was justified was because of the Cold War, because we were sort of like... You know, in addition to the scientific curiosity and everything else, we were in an arms race and we wanted to sort of demonstrate this amazing capability. And like Americans had been scared of Sputnik. And so you had this real like nationalism aspect to it.

And then, I mean, what's interesting about like what happens after is that like the entire sort of reason for the space program kind of goes away and then they need something else. Getting to that exactly right now. I was surprised by a couple of things that we can hit. Right here, which is number one, the degree to which people's interest in the whole moon program fell off a cliff. Yeah.

There were six total moon landings, the first in July of 1969, the last in December of 1972. And there's a Gallup poll taken at some point after Mission 3 or 4 or whatever that said 53% of Americans... opposed moving on to doing like a Mars landing or something like that. And there was another poll that said more than half the public wanted the president to spend less on space exploration. Now, historically...

From the 60s into the 70s, we've just had, as we mentioned, the Vietnam War, which sort of kicked the legs out from under. the finances of the great society, right? But also the 70s is known as a decade of austerity, of oil shocks, stagflation. So there's a sense that we kind of can't afford to do everything anymore. And so one of the things – there's two things going on. The American public is –

sort of losing interest in this. There were rumors that like the last landing on the moon, the government might have put pressure on the TV networks to even cover it. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. So the government is seeing here – Which is amazing, right? Like imagine if people landed on the moon today. I feel like I'd be – everyone would be watching it. You know what? I'm of two minds about that because number one –

Especially for the ability – now you would have better cameras and better video and you could see more things. Like think of the grainy images and things like that. Yeah, yeah. One or two cameras they could use. It was pretty boring. They're hopping around. Now I feel like you'd have GoPro-like cameras and you could see them picking up the moon rocks up close. So on the one hand, I feel like...

It makes sense. There wasn't a lot to do. But at the same time, people still get really excited about every SpaceX launch. But again, maybe it's just better production quality now is the answer. Yeah. I also, though, there's this aspect of like we've done that and Americans get bored very quickly. Yeah. Well, it's and so the idea was we would move on to Mars or whatever, but.

Again, austerity comes in. So there's two things going on. The government has sort of had their win. They're seeing that the public interest in the space program is waning. There are actual financial restraints coming in. That they can't spend as much. There's not really a reason to spend as much. And so, number one, what NASA is looking at is sort of an existential threat.

What is our mission? What are we supposed to do? If we're not going to Mars and we have to do things cheaper, then what are we – what is it that we're going to do? And one of the things – that the book describes as sort of like the compromise solution or, or maybe the, the brilliant way to like spin this is, well, no.

We don't have to go to Mars and then the Saturn or whatever. What we'll do is we'll make space flight seem as common as jumping on an airplane. Yeah. It was like make it accessible. We can do it. Many, many times. The basic thing is the sort of the numbers they predicted of how often they'd fly there. And, you know, we'll find out they were totally off. But like the idea, I mean, even the name, the shuttle, it was sort of like going to be something that.

you would just use all the time and it would go back and forth and like that reusability was like you know a key way to combat this idea that it was going to be expensive like we're going to make it so much more efficient and and just like every day Because with the Apollo program, every rocket used was destroyed. The only thing that they brought back intact was the actual crew module. And so it's only now, thanks to...

companies like SpaceX, that you can reuse rockets. So to a certain degree, what the shuttle program was, was sort of the technology at the time. allowing for a hybrid model. The idea is, can we have rockets that we can shoot up and then they'll fall back into the sea so that we can recover them and reuse them to a certain extent? But...

What will be completely reusable is – originally we were going to call it the Space Clipper, the Astroplane, the Starliner. They settled on the space shuttle. Which I think is a great name. It is a good name. And as you said, they were – planning on doing, like, they wanted to do a flight a week if they could. But to me, this is already, this is the contradiction at the heart of what we're talking about.

They, the government and NASA do not want to give up the magic of space flight. They want it to become routine, but that's also in aid of doing it on the cheap, not on the cheap. Maybe that's a little too critical, but cheaper. Yeah. Right. And so it leads to these – you sort of design it in a way that –

In a way that – it wasn't – the thing is that what's interesting about it is it actually didn't turn out to be on the cheap. So they actually did spend a lot on it. But right at the start, you have this idea that like we're going to do things in a – way that's just kind of much more um

I think like business-like, we were going to run this like a business instead of like the blank check that we had in Apollo. Well, or what ocean liners were when it became – an ocean liner has a schedule. It will leave a dock every – week at this time on this day, or what airlines do now, your plane's going to leave at 3.02 p.m. or whatever. When President Nixon announces the space shuttle program, he says that it's designed to...

Transform the space frontier of the 70s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 80s and 90s. It will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of... But again, to me, that's the conflict, which is – there's a quote from Higginbotham in the book.

In some ways, it was as if the 16th century explorer Ferdinand Magellan had proposed to follow up the first circumnavigation of the world by rowing across Lisbon Harbor and back. kids and maybe Americans generally in the eighties thought this was cutting edge gee whiz science. And it was, but I wonder what that did to morale inside of NASA.

Because they know they are – they're seeing their budgets cut back and they know that they're ratcheting back their ambition basically. Right. They're aiming for something that is sort of –

It's like if Apple built the iPhone 11 again. It's sort of like they're aiming for something that they had already done. They're just trying to kind of make it look like they're – Like it's something that you could do often, make it more accessible, but they're not – there's no – like at the heart of it, there's no innovation in the – goal here. Going to Mars would be the next thing. That would be the gee whiz. We're pushing the boundaries of human endeavor versus, hey, we're just going to...

Okay, we'll have a cool thing that we can reuse. We'll shoot it up and it'll fly down like an airplane, which is what the space shuttle was designed to do. And what are you going to do up there? I don't know. We'll spin around for a week or so and do some experiments.

Well, they had this goal also, this sort of far-off thing of the space station, and the shuttle was to get to the space station. They were both sort of like a tandem project, right? Well, and this is the second point that I wanted to lay down already. It surprised me the degree to which, and in retrospect, this is obvious. It surprised me the degree to which...

Everything justifying the continuation of the space program was because there could also be a simultaneous military use. Even with the space station, they're talking about... You know, obviously... Not only the government, but even the CIA still launches their own spy satellites and stuff like that. But the reason that the space shuttle is designed with a 60-foot long, 15-foot wide sort of cargo bay is not only so you can put things like the Hubble Space...

telescope up there, but you can also put spy satellites up there. And they literally were thinking about offensive operations against Soviet spacecraft in space if it was necessary. So this is a craft that, as opposed to just a module that's... in orbit and has little control other than firing rockets here and there. If we have to go blow up a Russian satellite, maybe we can use the space shuttle to do that. Anyway, like I said, it's obvious in retrospect, but the fact that a civilian...

Space program continued probably wouldn't have happened if they weren't thinking of the military component as well. Yeah. And I don't remember this perfectly, but this like caused. dissension in NASA, right? Like there was this idea that like we are a civilian program and there were people who sort of did not want to build for the military and which was not sort of in high standing at that point. Certainly, tail end of the Vietnam War.

So lining up again, the contradictions, we're still doing great stuff in space, but it's going to be routine, right? It's going to become commonplace. We're still doing great stuff in space, but we're going to do it on the cheap. The budget allocation that they wanted for the shuttle program was $14 billion.

That's what NASA asked for. They got $5.5 billion, and I believe even that was cut down. Do you remember from the book, there's this infamous Alan Shepard quote, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, about... The lowest common – the lowest bitter. Do you remember that? I don't remember the quote, but I remember the sort of – Yeah. When asked what he was thinking about –

What was he thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury Redstone rocket? Alan Shepard, the first American in space, infamously replied, the fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder. Right, right. From NASA's point of view now, we've been talking about the government's point of view for continuing this. NASA is feeling, like I said, an existential sort of...

sort of Damocles hanging over their head. They're afraid if they don't produce something, then civilian space exploration could just end. And so when they start to, it's not that... Even with the Apollo program, they were going out to civilian contractors and the lowest bidder would get the contract or whatever. But now they're doing it with...

Without a third of the resources of the Vietnam War, they're now doing it sort of like any other sort of military, civilian or government contracting out where they're... For each component of it, as opposed to design, they're designing it in-house, but they're leaving sort of the details and the bits and pieces to these individual contractors.

Yeah, and they're sort of overwhelmingly military contractors whose people – companies whose sort of other business is to be the lowest bidder on all kinds of things. And this is like we're talking about like the smallest parts, like, you know, like the thing that. You know, was the failure point was this rubber seal. But like, you know, imagine how many rubber seals there are on a thing like that. Like it was.

I mean, it's how government works, but it's also like you would imagine that like everything that you would need for a program that is sort of like... done for the first time, you know, wouldn't be kind of off, like you wouldn't have any kind of off the part, off the shelf part. Right. The, so what they end up with is the orbiter, which is the part of the shuttle that. It's the shuttle. It resembles an airplane. It glides back down after –

coming in orbit. They have the external tank, which is, if you're visualizing or if you see it on YouTube right now, the biggest tank, the center tank, when it launches, that was, it held the liquid hydrogen and the fuel to just get into orbit. That was not reusable. That was destroyed after each launch. But the two solid rocket boosters on the side were reusable. They would burn off all of their... fuel and crash land back in the ocean. But, okay.

Budget cuts mean that lots of things are cut. A dozen orbiters were originally planned, so a dozen space shuttles were planned, and they only did half a dozen over the course of the program. As you said, they wanted to launch weekly. They were only occasionally over the course of the shuttle program able to go monthly. There were 135 shuttle missions over 30 years.

On average, they're only doing four and a half a year. Now, that average is out that way because after accidents, they shut down the program. Right. Shocking to me. They did things among the various cuts that they do. there were always plans to have a escape system. Right. So that the crew could, you know.

jettison if there was something going on in launch. The other thing that shocked me, Farhad, is the first launch of the shuttle system with the two astronauts on there, the first launch ever... was a manned launch with people on board. To cut costs, even SpaceX to this day, they do multiple launches before they try to put people on there. But because...

They have a limited budget and they're trying to rush to prove that they can do something. It shocked me to learn that the first ever launch of the space shuttle with people on it. was was basically the trial run yeah um you know i'd never thought about the escape system before because like you imagine you know if you

If you have a problem in space, you can't use an escape system. But, like, the thing that happened in one of the Apollo missions was, like, on the launch pad, they needed to escape because the thing was on fire. And...

That was like a big lesson from the Apollo program, that they needed to improve the way that somebody could escape from that. And then they just sort of ignored – and then they did that for the rest of the Apollo program, and then they just kind of went back on that and kind of ignored it or – But it wasn't like a thing that needed to be done, and we can't afford an escape system basically. Right. So you're mentioning the –

The thing that maybe we should acknowledge also at the top is space travel is dangerous. And we're also at a time where they're still learning as they go. One of the things that people will ask is, was NASA too reckless or whatever? But we should stipulate up front that this is – To this day, going into space is not something that is like air travel, which is relatively safe at this point. Well, that's also the sort of irony here is that they tried...

In some ways, their goal was less ambitious because they weren't going to Mars. But also they were sort of aiming for the sky in terms of making it like – you know, like a product, like accessible to everyone and civilians could go on it. They were aiming to do something that, you know, in some ways would be more difficult, especially this is like... you know, a whole new thing to humanity and we're going to make it like weekly.

Just an aside, you mentioned the fire, the Apollo 1 mission in January 1967 where three astronauts were killed. Again, this wasn't in space. They're testing things on a launch pad. But that story blew my mind because – so there's a fire caused, we think, by a spark. And the reason that it ignited is because at that point the – modules interior where the astronauts were, was filled with pure oxygen. Now,

Think of the original Star Trek where the ship is flown by switches and things like that. There's not touchscreens. So imagine an interior where there's tons of switches and buttons and lots of opportunities for little things to spark unprotected wires. Also Velcro. Velcro, the sort of the role that Velcro played in that basically because it's extremely flammable. And they had it everywhere in the in the in the cabin because they had like a checklist that they had. And so.

And, you know, and they knew that this was a problem and, you know, again, sort of like overlooked it. Well, I would say that they learned lessons from it too. They changed the management and safety culture after that. But it is weird to think that it possibly happened because someone – pulled a Velcro thing off the wall where the clipboard was, and that's what did it. So NASA is not unfamiliar with the danger, not unfamiliar with disasters.

But they also want to, like they say, show that this is something that can become commonplace and something that's reliable. To do this with their goal of... maybe launching once a week. They throw open the applications for astronauts to... Plenty more people. The Apollo program, there were maybe a few dozen because there were only so many missions. But if you're going to do a mission a week, they're throwing open the astronaut program to hundreds of people.

I'm not going to suggest that they lowered the standards in terms of training because what they actually did was... They sort of bifurcated the roles on a shuttle mission. You would still have the pilots and the people that were supposed to know how to get something into orbit and how to get it back and do all that stuff. But then, because you're going up... to do scientific experiments and things like that. They create new roles.

new actual titles like payload specialists and mission specialists. And that would be, well, I'm not... I've gone through astronaut training, but maybe not as intensively as the pilot, because I'm strapped into the back and I'm just along for the ride, essentially, because once we get into orbit, I'm the scientist that's going to do the experiments. Right. There's this aspect, though, of a lot of this being...

marketing for NASA. Like, we're going to make it – we're going to have civilians on it. We're going to make it accessible to a wider number of people. And each time they sort of announced this and then they had this huge contest to pick the civilians, it were – you know, it was – It was marketing. It was new. NASA was in the news kind of constantly because of these initiatives. So those are two separate things, but I'll get to that right now.

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Two free weeks at 1password.com slash ride. Don't let security slow your business down. Go to 1password.com slash ride. the astronaut program to more people. I think I saw that there were like 25,000 applications in the seventies of which 8,000 were considered. So they're doing real numbers in terms of like putting you through space camp, but.

They are also clamoring, as you said, for this idea that, OK, if we are going to have routine spaceflight, then we should have normal folks up there. We should have civilians up there. It was made known that NASA was considering this and lots of people... Jumped on this and thought it was a great idea. The writer, Norman Mailer, campaigned hard that he should go up. Walter Cronkite, the news anchor, apparently was very interested in going up. John Denver was mentioned. Celebrities.

I just want a side on that. I found that kind of mind-blowing and really a testament to the 80s or 70s and 80s as being sort of better than our time. He considered normal people, and the only people we consider to go up in space now are billionaires who funded. So that's our version of the schoolteacher. They were talking about doing things. They talked about…

Potentially opening it up to rich people to pay their way, but also introducing shuttle clubs where you could pool your money and sort of become a part of it. But who were the actual first non-real real? astronauts to go up were this blew my mind politicians yeah so i did not know that either In 1985, Senator Jake Garn went into space as part of the shuttle program. And in 1986, Representative Bill Nelson of Florida became the second sitting member of Congress.

to travel aboard the space shuttle. And his was like right before the Challenger, right? I'm going to come to that. But Garn, this is from the book, Garn maintained that it was a constitutional necessity for him to fly aboard. The shuttle as an observer, a payload specialist whose expertise was to understand where taxpayers' money was going, which is a bunch of BS.

And we skipped ahead because we didn't mention that the shuttle program begins in 1981. And so 1981, 1982, 1983, they're launching missions not, like we said, weekly as they wanted. not even monthly, because they are finding problems all the time. So they will, the heat tiles were a problem. The landing gear was a problem at some point. So every time they go up...

Because they hadn't spent years testing this, they're finding things and they're having to fix things on the fly. But in 1984, President Reagan announces that the first civilian... Non-politician to go into space will be a teacher. He announces the teacher in space program. More than 11,000 teachers apply. Apparently, instead of the teacher, the thing that almost happened was...

A journalist. They were going to send a journalist. So Farhad, as a journalist, would you go now? Would you have gone into space in 1984? Yeah, I definitely would go either time. Yeah. Really? Because I would definitely not. Oh, really? I mean, I. I, like, have kids and stuff, but, like, so I don't, like, I want to go skydiving, but I haven't. But going to space, that's, I mean, especially in the 80s, like, I would have jumped at that.

When you were a younger man and had no, yes, no responsibilities. Right. One of the things that we need to mention is that I said that the shuttle program begins in 81. It was almost canceled. several times before it even has its first flight. During the Carter administration, it came very close to being shuttered, which is why they're trying to get the darn thing in the air. There's a quote from the book that says,

One of the engineers involved thought that the chances of a disaster happening on the very first shuttle flight were 50-50, but it succeeds. Even after it succeeds, the delays... are bringing pressure on NASA because, again, the government was promised this would be routinizable, this would be something that would be happening on the regs. They're unbeknownst to... A lot of people at NASA...

Some of the contractors are also getting concerned about the technology, and this is where we should bring in Morton Thoyokol. It's a weird— Thoyokol? Thiokol, yeah. Thiokol, that's a good way, yeah. So Thiokol is a defense contractor or just an engineering firm that – is responsible for creating the two booster rockets that are on the side. The solid fuel ones, which were like the novel technology on the space shuttle. Mm-hmm.

They had feared that on the very first launch that those solid rocket boosters were this close to igniting on the launch pad. For years, they were modeling the effects of the rockets exploding during launch because, again, those rockets only have to get the shuttle into orbit and then they fall back down to Earth. So the only problem that they have to deal with is the firing, the initial stage, leaving the atmosphere.

But because, again, of budget cuts and time constraints, they were cutting corners in the sense that they didn't have full-scale test data for... drawing conclusions about how the boosters would work as you're going through the atmosphere and air pressure is changing and things like that. They had never been flight tested, never been flight tested. The only firing test that they had done.

at their corporate head or test grounds or whatever in the Utah desert, where they would turn them on their sides and turn them on and fire them. They had never shot them in the air. They had never shot them vertically. They had only shot them. on the ground. But they had this idea that they could make up for the parts that they hadn't tested by building in redundancies. And so they had this very...

I was surprised to see sort of like how sophisticated their like list of redundancies they had. And they had various parts that like had no redundancies and they had strict regulations about it. And the failure happened on. One of the redundancies. A redundancy that I would argue, though, is there because of a corner cut, which is the the rocket boosters are.

They're nearly 15 stories tall. They weigh 590 tons. They're the largest solid rockets built to that time. Now, they're so big that you cannot transport them. across the country from where they're constructed easily. So you have to cut them into sections and then reconstruct the sections once you're at Cape Canaveral. So those rocket boosters are coming in these sections from Utah to Florida.

Farhad, what would have been the logical solution if you had more money? Put the factory right next to it. Exactly. But because they don't have the money to do that. They're putting them in pieces and then reconstructing them. And because they're in these segmented pieces, that's where the O-ring design comes from. It's not one single chamber. It's multiple chambers, and the O-rings are designed to essentially allow the fuel to move through the entire structure.

without it being one single structure. And the way to think of the O-rings are sort of like in plumbing. Yeah, that seemed, yeah. Or like the gasket in your kitchen faucet or in a carburetor or something like that where – When pressure is applied, it's sort of like not really a foam but similar to a foam where it will expand to fill and seal the various segments. Right. It's –

And it's that kind of, I don't know, I don't think it's actually rubber. Maybe it was, but it was that kind of rubberized material that is supposed to expand to fill sort of the gaps. Right. It said it was a synthetic rubber compound. These O-rings, they were only a quarter of an inch thick, but they're 37 feet in circumference.

Again, so large that they have to be shipped on railroad cars from I think it was Kentucky or to Florida or whatever. They – the company – how did you pronounce it again? Thiokol? Thiokol. Thiokol. Thiokol is concerned from the beginning about the – How reliable these are, this material is, because if you think about it, you know, it's in the middle of a blast furnace. From some of the early launches, they're seeing weird scarring.

And that that shouldn't be happening, which is suggesting that the seals aren't making a full tight seal. And so the they knew from the beginning that it was. This was a delicate, as you say, point of failure for the whole system. Yeah. But I think that what they figured is that they felt like...

At one point, this is from the book, they made a calculation that a pair, quoting now, a pair of solid boosters could be expected to undergo a failure resulting in the loss of crew and spacecraft once every 18 to 30 missions. But the idea is you want to launch once a week. So they're taking calculated risks where they're saying, OK, hopefully we'll be able to get through the first dozen flights and we'll be fixing things as we go. Right, right.

And that accounted for the delay between the flights. It's like they were noticing problems, and one of the problems was the seals. Right. So – Like we mentioned, the reason that they're only averaging four and a half flights a year is because as they're noticing problems, they're delaying. But they're also noticing things when it's on the launch pad. And, you know, they're actually they're 10 seconds away from firing the rocket.

It's in the abort, abort, because we're seeing this problem, that problem. So on the one hand, it's not that they're being reckless and just going full scale ahead. They are trying to fix problems, but they're fixing problems on the fly. Yeah. I had a little bit of a, like a mixed reaction to the whole program, which is like, they were clearly cutting corners, but also it's...

It's just so incredibly complex. I think that at the time it was like the most complex thing we've ever built. I don't know if like the Large Hadron Collider or something is bigger since, but like it was – and so there's this like –

You know, when they launched the first one and it works, I was like cheering for them because it's amazing that they were able to do this. And, you know, despite all the budget cuts and everything, they made this incredibly sophisticated thing and it worked, you know, sometimes. To bring it back to the Teacher in Space program, which is announced in 1984, the shuttle disaster happens in January of 1986. So there's a two-year period here.

where the government, where NASA announces this program, takes applications. And Sharon Krista Corrigan... was born in September 1948. She met Steve McAuliffe at their small Catholic high school that they attended in Massachusetts. They marry in 1970, have two children.

She was at National Honor Society in high school. She gets a master's in education, becomes a teacher, teaches American history, English, and civics. At the time of the Teacher in Space Project, she's teaching at Concord High School. in New Hampshire. She sent in her teacher in space application on the last possible day in February of 1985. And one of the things that I found outside of the book was...

When she was a kid and John Glenn orbited the Earth for the first time, she told a friend in high school, do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon, maybe even taking a bus? I want to do that. which is ironic. That's, again, the routinizable spaceflight idea. On her application form for the Teacher in Space program, she writes, I watched the space age being born. I would like to participate.

Out of the applicant pool, there are 114 semifinalists from each state or territory. So she's one of the finalists from New Hampshire. She becomes one of the 10 finalists nationwide after being selected. And she finally becomes the teacher selected. She takes a year of absence from teaching. NASA pays her salary. And as I mentioned, she does receive astronaut training, which... Again, though, I feel like the book sort of paints as it was astronaut training that...

Maybe you or I could survive. So maybe not the rigorous astronaut training that had happened previously. Right, right. I thought she was amazing. 100%. It's the way that like – what I especially loved about it was like – so she becomes this celebrity and is interviewed by kind of everyone and it – That reignites interest in the space program. And the reason everyone was watching the Challenger...

You know, explosion. The reason school kids were watching it was because there was this teacher in space. But she just seemed like an incredible teacher. Like, just like the way. The way that she positioned the, you know, in her application and in the way that she was talking to the media.

The way that she talked about the mission as like part of education and kind of educating Americans and her own students in science. And it just seemed like, you know, we don't have teacher celebrities anymore. I guess we kind of do with like. the vice presidential candidate, but like it's not, it's, it's unusual. And like, you know, it was, it was really cool that she just like became this huge star.

It's one thing to be brave and say, I'm going to go into space. But it's another thing to be brave enough to take on the role of being a role model of I am going to be the face of. humanity's attempt to continue to explore space. But also, at the same time... be the face of sparking interest in science and things like that for children. So, right, she's incredible. She's personable. She's...

funny. She's charismatic. She goes on Good Morning America. She goes on Johnny Carson. Johnny asks her about the mission and she says, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat, just get on. The plan is that she's going to do some experiments, but also... teach lessons from space. So she's going to do some science experiments around hydroponics, magnetism, Newton's laws, that sort of stuff, which again...

As opposed to being a teacher in a high school trying to do Newton's laws where you can't really do it right, but you can actually do that because you're in space and there's no gravity and stuff like that. It's an amazing concept. She's also had a module called The Ultimate Field Trip, lessons about the benefits of space travel called Where We've Been, Where We're Going. And this is key.

NASA says what we'll do is we're going to broadcast this to millions of school children via closed circuit TV. So it's not just she goes on The Tonight Show or she'll be on CNN. We're also going to beam this into classrooms. That is part. of this is we want this to be sort of a teaching moment from space. I mean, I just wonder, like, was there no kind of, I don't know, risk analyst or something there that said, you know, this like...

Could end very badly if all the kids are watching. I guess we'll come to that at the end. By the way, I do want to mention there are – Six other astronauts on this mission, and I, you know, she's the one that's remembered because of this program. But there were NASA lifers on this. They were former Air Force pilots. Ronald McNair was the second African-American ever to go into space. This wasn't his first flight.

Onizuka was the first Asian-American to go into space. Greg Jarvis hadn't been into space before, but he was in the Air Force. He was the one that had been scheduled to go up earlier, but got bumped twice for the two politicians. Right. So he was supposed to go up in April of 1985, got bumped for Jake Garn. He was supposed to go up in January – earlier in January 1986 but was again bumped for Bill Nelson.

Bill Nelson might have been on the flight before the Challenger. I should have looked that up. The launch of this particular flight, like many shuttle missions... in the year and six months prior to it kept being delayed. So it was supposed to happen not in January, but months before. The mission that this is the 25th space shuttle mission. It's STS-51L. They were going to deploy a satellite and then do some other experiments.

So in the months previous, the 15th shuttle launch, which was the first classified military flight in NASA's history where we assume they put up spy satellites or something, this was the shuttle Discovery. had been pushed back due to record-breaking cold weather that had swept down the eastern seaboard. So maybe this was a year previous. Maybe this was the previous winter. Now, the public is kept in the dark about that because they're not even told about this mission because it's classified.

But engineers admitted that... The three consecutive nights of freezing conditions had caused icing on the launch pad for that launch, which at the time they're thinking is going to damage the, again, the heat shield tiles. And so that's one of the reasons why that had been proposed. postponed multiple times. But back to the contractor, they have been growing worried. They've been seeing the problems with the O-rings in terms of maybe they're not making a seal, so they're getting scorching.

But they have become concerned about the temperature for the O-rings because if the temperature goes too low, the foam is not as flexible. The material is not as flexible and might not make a seal. And if that happens, then, again, you have this hot fuel that, God knows, the temperature that could be leaking out, that could be going into other compartments that it's not supposed to go into yet, that, again, could...

They express this internally at the company. But OK, NASA is under pressure to keep the space program going. The contractor is under pressure not to lose this huge contract. Right. I may be wrong, but I think it's like their biggest thing, right? I think it was their biggest contract that they had. Right. And they were a subcontractor of Lockheed?

I think so. Right, right. So, right, you give a big contract out to somebody, somebody else subcontract, somebody else subcontract, down to, as you're saying, like screws, specialized screws could be subcontracted out to somebody. At the same time. There are signs of stress at NASA in the sense that there are 14,000 contractors and NASA employees working at the Kennedy Space Center at this point. And they're working 12-hour days, seven days a week, often for months at a time.

without a day off because they're trying to keep to these schedules. They're already falling behind schedules. Hey, it's been two months and we haven't had a launch. When are we going to be able to launch? This is quoting from the book. Technicians had begun routinely skipping hundreds of maintenance requirements, and some of them began to fear for their jobs if they reported accidental damage. I want to stress again, it's not that they're missing.

So they're trying to be safe. They're trying to do all the checklists. But the term that keeps coming up in the book is what is an acceptable risk? You're weighing the scales of it's been three months. I think we've got the problem fixed. Can we just go so that we can go? There's also like this compartmentalization of like knowledge where like the engineers who are working with the O-rings.

You know, have some have some worries about it. And then they tell it to their bosses who sort of like change it and paint it a little better for the people. There's a contractor. And the people at NASA seem like there's all these. It was interesting because they don't have like they don't have the Internet. So there's all these conference calls and they spend a lot of time on the phone in conference calls.

It just seems like the meetings are very unproductive because like the engineers are sort of pointing out what's wrong and then the bosses are sort of pushing back and being like, well, you know, we can still launch though, right? Right. We're going to come to a really crucial way that that decision is made here. So the Challenger... mission that we're discussing, STS-51L. It's the 10th flight for the Challenger itself. It's the 25th flight of the space shuttle fleet, as we mentioned.

So all the way into 1986, we've only done 25 flights. I'm bringing that up again because it's not like they had done 100 flights. They're still so early into this. They're supposed to originally launch January. 22nd, 1986. But there's delay, delay, delay for various technical reasons. And when I say delay, it's not just, oh, we're supposed to launch tomorrow, but we scrub it overnight. They would be going on to the shuttle.

And they'd be maybe even starting the countdown. And it's like, all right, everybody get back out. We'll try again tomorrow. So you've got NASA. Worrying about the delays, you've got the contractors and the workers at Cape Canaveral. Oh, my God, this is we're not going again. But think about the astronauts themselves. You know, after the fourth time you've been pulled out of that uncomfortable.

position, maybe they want to go at some point. There's all these moments where they're about to launch and then they have to stop. And there are people – there are astronauts who like sort of are wondering if they'll ever fly. Right, right. Like the – Because they constantly get bumped and yeah. Sure. Well, or get bumped for a politician. Right. So – They're supposed to go up January 22nd. They finally go up on January 28th, 1986. The problem is that overnight, there's a cold front.

When I say cold front, this is like the coldest cold front in recorded Florida history or something like that, like a 100-year cold front. Overnight measurements taken say that the... Around the launch site itself, it gets down to 25 degrees Fahrenheit or minus four Celsius. But also different parts, depending on where you are, like it might have gone...

to as low as eight degrees Fahrenheit. Especially in the morning when the sun comes up, like there's still parts that are in the shade. And the... They're initially worried about things like pipes freezing or what is this going to do? Like, what if... Ice falls off and it hits, again, the heat tiles or punctures, I don't know, one of the rockets or whatever. But back at Morton Theocle.

The engineers, especially two of them who have been really concerned about this for years, are raising the alarm about what the temperature will do to the O-rings. They implore upon their bosses, we need to stop this launch because of the temperature. The night before... They reach out over a conference call. Once they hear about the overnight temperature, they schedule a conference call with NASA. It's held at 9 p.m. the night before the eventual launch.

And they get on with NASA and they say, we really don't think you should go because of the temperature. They explain the O-ring situation. And NASA, I'm not saying this is negligence or criminal or anything like that, but at least according to the book, this is where really... NASA is like...

Oh, my God, you guys now are coming to us with this. You hadn't thought of this before. They're really dismissive of it, almost in the sense that if this was a problem, why didn't you bring it to us before? Why are you bringing it to us now? Some guys just want to look good without calling attention to themselves. That me. Mack Weldon Apparel gives me that understated good look for understated confidence in all situations. Mack Weldon shirts are my go-to work casual style.

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Yeah. And they had – the NASA people were sort of relying on the idea that it had previously launched in the cold and so they were like – They were like – as you said before, it seemed like an acceptable risk. That classic – The classified mission that had gone up in cold weather, which is ironically why the engineers at the contractor were convinced that there was a problem. But NASA is saying, well, we've already done it, so we proved that it's not a problem. Yeah.

So here's the really – and this chapter, I don't know if you felt this way. This is where it really felt like that book Chernobyl or whatever. This was like a real potboiler, like I'm on the edge of my seat. They have the conference call. They get off the conference call. They say, we want to commiserate amongst ourselves. We'll call you back. And in between this and when they call back. They change their tune and they say, OK, NASA, we think you can go. NASA asked them to put that in writing.

So essentially, the contractor delivers a stated decision to proceed with launch. The leadership submitted a recommendation for launch. The teleconference ended. Behind the scenes, according to the book, some of the engineers that had been essentially whistleblowing on this are not in favor of this, but they're overruled. Yeah. So right there, it's tragic because that they could have.

stopped the launch right there. They got this close to stopping the launch and blew through that sort of safety barrier there. Yeah, that's really the moment where you're like, um... This is like a decision for money. They're doing this for time and money, and they're not – Not money. It's the pressure of everything. It's my career. It's losing the contract, but it's also – we've got to –

We got to produce. I guess it all comes down to money in a way, but reputation-wise, everything. Well, I mean especially at the contractor, Thiokol, they're like – the reason they changed their – their decision is because they're afraid they're going to lose this contract. And it's like, it's like the thing that they're doing and NASA is their main contractor. And they're also worried that NASA is going to choose some other fuel system or sort of open it up. And so it really seemed like.

This is on the line for them, and they really had to deliver even if some of their people thought that it was risky. From NASA's… at least what they say subsequently and maybe even at the time, is that what we thought happened is that they had gone over their data. a second or third or fourth time and thought twice about it and said, OK, this is fine. We've got concerns, but you're right. We looked hard at it and we think we can do it.

There's still one more chance for them to stop because in the next morning. when the sun rises, there is so much ice. One of the technicians on the gantry, it's a giant superstructure to get the astronauts up into the shuttle at the top. He says it looks like something out of Dr. Zhivago. There's ice on the gantry. There's ice covering the lower half of the right-hand booster rocket. Because, again, one of the rockets, even if part of the...

of the craft is in the sun and is maybe melting. The other half might still be in the shade for a while. And so even though by the time of launch, ambient temperature has risen to 34 degrees, so above freezing. which 34 degrees was apparently the formal limits to launch, people pointed out subsequently there still could have been parts in shadows that maybe weren't at that temperature. Also, I don't know if that's enough time to thaw from, you know.

25 to, you know, Fahrenheit to 34, but. Yeah. So. At. 11.38 a.m. Eastern Time, the shuttle lifts off. At 11.35, a few minutes before that... CNN switches their broadcast to live video of the launch. The family members of the astronauts are all there on the ground watching. And when...

When the shuttle takes off, everything seems to be going normal, so much so that back at the contractors watching this, the ones that have worn about the O-rings and the temperatures literally say, wow, we just dodged a bullet. Right. They're totally relieved. Yeah. And that's because for 73 seconds, everything seemed to be going right. And then we've all seen the footage. And it turns out that the failure... Actually, I'm going to read so I get the technical part right here.

The cause of the disaster was the failure of the primary and secondary redundant O-ring seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster. The record low temperatures on the morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber O-rings, reducing their ability to seal the joint. Shortly after liftoff, the seals were breached and hot pressurized gas from within the SRB leaked through the joint and burned through the aft attachment strut connecting to the external propellant tank.

And then into the tank itself, propellant tank, not good. That's what makes things blow up. This is where we can get into the Mandela effect. Why? does everyone remember watching this live? Well, on the one hand... I saw in the book, they estimate that by that evening, 95% of the American public had seen the video of the explosion. And so, right, most 95% of Americans were at work or at school.

So they couldn't have seen it. So part of it is that it was an image that we all saw over and over and over and over. But... The reason that a lot of children remember this is because NASA had arranged satellite broadcast into TV sets in many schools because of McAuliffe's role in the mission. And this is why. So many people remember that.

The book makes the point that even the people on the ground, like the family members, when it first happens, they're not sure that anything wrong has happened. And there's almost like a half a minute where it doesn't dawn on people. So I wonder. The TV coverage does pull away and the news anchors start to say something seems to have gone wrong. But I don't think it was like if I was in third grade and I'm watching this. It's not going to occur to me that, oh, my God, they're all dead. Yeah, I...

One of the amazing things about like reading about history now is like you can go back on YouTube and watch all this stuff. And I really recommend watching all these videos. It's just like they're an insight into the 80s in like multiple different fronts.

I was watching like kind of behind the scenes at CNN and they don't have computers and they're calling each other to figure out what's happening. And it's just this amazing like scene of a newsroom in the 80s. But what was interesting about it is you watch these videos. There's videos from the perspective of the family watching it, and you can kind of hear them. And they're not – there's no –

There's a little bit of like a surprise to see it, but there's no gasp. No one, no one thinks it has blown up until. You know, until at least like 30 or 40 seconds later, the CNN, there's a CNN shot of the anchor saying, you know, another successful launch. And then the. The B-roll is on the shuttle as it's going, and the guy's about to cut away, and then there's this spark. And yeah, it was not clear what had happened. And you sort of only can tell, like...

When you're watching it afterward, you can tell that it doesn't look – it's not something good that has happened. But if you were watching it at the time, I don't think that you would have known that – especially if you were a kid. I don't think you would have known that it exploded immediately.

I don't think if you were an adult, you would have known. Eventually, when you see the two rockets, that famous picture of them, they're sort of flying willy-nilly off. Well, that's not supposed to do that, right? But again, I'm saying that... This is the argument I'm making for the Mandela effect of – it wasn't like –

classrooms full of children were all of a sudden screaming instantaneously. Like it would have been something that even it would have to be explained to adults. Here's what's happened. Oh God, that's sad. So while I can, obviously this is. Something that was tragic and impactful, probably not instantaneously. Although that does get into my sort of opening line usually of back when things were relatively normal and chill. I do. It's not like.

The 80s and 90s were perfect, calm, peaceful times. Certainly not everywhere on the planet, but something like this being the disaster that... People of our generation remember as like that was the tragedy. You know, this is it's not the equivalent of 9-11, but like that's the closest we have for the do you remember where you were when you heard a sort of thing.

Yeah. I think that's right. I also think though like the best – one of the best parts for me about this book was sort of the aftermath because – It just shows an America that is just so much better functioning than ours. The whole – they convene – Congress convenes this – Or the president does, I think. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, also known as the Rogers Commission. Actual experts are on this. So there's Sally Ride. I will tell you.

Sally Ride, Neil Armstrong himself, Chuck Yeager. Richard Feynman's on it. Richard Feynman's on it. We'll get to him in a second. They hold hearings and not – We're used to – again, 9-11 commission happens years later or whatever. They had hearings and this commission like the month later. And it's not partisan. It's so interesting because it's – there's no like people –

standing for the cameras. They're like scientists asking like scientific questions and the engineers at the companies are sort of responding and like with the technical details. And it just seems like they're actually investigating this, which is like, you know, just... Not something you see anymore. And nobody is trying to play it for political points and like this is why – because you cut so much money, this is why this happened or whatever. The –

We mentioned Feynman. There's very colorful anecdotes of him in the book. He almost didn't sign the final commission recommendation and paper because he thought to a certain degree there was whitewash. going on because... NASA wants to continue and no one wants to believe that there was serious negligence at fault. But in these, like you're saying, in the hearings, he will, to explain how the O-rings happened, he'll like take out a cup of water and like a sponge.

and like do like Mr. Wizard style stuff right there in the hearing to explain why what you just said in your testimony was kind of BS because look at this. Yeah, it's like –

It's like demonstrating for the public the science of it. I thought that was amazing. I went back and watched that too, and it's just incredible. And then, yeah, he almost doesn't sign it. They have to allow him to write an appendix where he sort of has a descent of some parts of it in order for— him to sign off on it but like just the that even that like the the way that they went about investigating it

I like sort of wish for that time. It was clearly like, oh, and the other thing, it goes into the Ronald Reagan response to it, which has this amazing sort of... It sort of ends with – Peggy Noonan writes this speech like immediately, and he ends with his speech with saying something like they –

They slit the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God, which is like just such an amazing thing to say. It just seemed like... A lot of parts of it seemed like the movie response to a disaster that you would like want in like an ideal situation that we don't have anymore. Right. It's almost like a West Wing style. Hey, look at when government could function or when everybody's acting in good faith and – right. Almost society can function.

I don't want to make note of this, but I think to be a little bit thorough, everyone is hopeful that this thing just exploded and disintegrated. They spend months... combing the ocean for debris. They find debris. They find eventually the remains of the astronauts because it turns out that the crew, what happened is it didn't disintegrate. The way the explosion happened made it break up into pieces.

And the crew compartment was essentially intact. And so they determined that the crew compartment... falls for two minutes and 45 seconds. Now, granted, at more than 200 miles per hour. So once you hit the water, you're definitely a goner. But they also later determined that some of the oxygen tanks... on the flight deck have been used for almost that amount of time. There's also one, like, I think it was like a...

It was either the oxygen tank or something that would allow the pilot to get out of the seat. The only way that that could happen is to pull a latch from someone sitting behind them, and that latch had been pulled. So it seems likely... that at least some of the astronauts were alive as they're crashing to Earth, unfortunately. Yeah.

I, this is an aside, but I got, I was thinking about this the other day because they determined, you know, the Titan sub that exploded. There was this theory that they knew they were going to die because they... They like dropped their weights. But in fact, like there's this new investigation that suggested that they didn't know. And it just kind of.

actually happened like the way we sort of would it wanted the you might have wanted the challenger to go where just sort of they didn't know um but yeah that that part of the um Challenger disaster is just like chilling, the idea that they knew they were going to die for like two minutes as they were falling. Some of them at least. There's also – there's indication that why would you have the –

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Acorns Advisors, LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor. View important disclosures at acorns.com slash ride. So to wrap up here, we've sort of already been touching on this, but. This whole disaster has been sort of like a case study for things like engineering safety, whistleblowing. But on a more fundamental level, like, it's not...

an accident that the person that wrote this book also wrote the Chernobyl book because it's also a case study in group decision-making and the dangers of groupthink. Like, there's... I'm not saying that there needed to be antagonistic sort of divisions in this program, but everybody from the contractors to NASA, to the government, to the astronauts, everybody.

is incentivized to take these calculated risks. And again, maybe that's what is necessary to do a dangerous thing is to take calculated risks. But what do you think about the idea that... There was – no one was ever incentivized enough to be like we absolutely should not go. I ended up feeling like I think that's right. I think that there's – There clearly should have been, you know, a larger budget, more testing.

Some sort of an ombudsman that has the authority to say, I'm responsible to nobody. My job here is to, if I think it's reached a certain threshold, I overrule everybody. In nuclear subs, the whole idea of you have to have two keys to launch the missiles. Right. Like there there there didn't seem to be a fail safe that you reach a threshold and.

Even though everybody else, 95 percent of the constituent parts of this program are a go, somebody has the authority to say no go. Yeah, I think – on the other hand, I do think that there's a little bit of like … Space travel is difficult and some accident would have happened. And I feel like I feel like that there's I absolved many of the people of like wrongdoing based on that. Um, because like you have to figure out as a society how to do kind of, um, you know, things.

Yeah, things that you've never done before as a species and that are dangerous. Can I tell you, I've been reading a lot lately about – Ocean exploration and sort of like the exploration of – you think of Shackleton and that freezing in the Arctic and stuff like that. But – And we think of the Titanic as this disaster that, oh, a ship went down. But like 50 years before the Titanic, going across an ocean was a risky...

maybe like one in five chance you might not make it thing. And when you go even further back in history to like, you know, the 1500s or the 1400s. All the time, ships would just go out and you'd never hear from them again. So think of how many times and how many thousands of sailors died.

exploring on the ocean or just on a trade ship and there's a storm or something that happens. And that was just accepted as this is, like you said, part of human – this is a dangerous human endeavor and this is – These are the risks. Yeah. And just sort of the inherent complexity of this whole project, like that you would have a failure in a small part seems –

seems like not that surprising. And in fact, you know, and then there was another space shuttle that crashed for the heat tile reasons, which is also the thing that they had been worried about. I came away from this book thinking – it made me feel like – There could have been four or five more accidents. Yeah. It's surprising that there weren't – yeah. Maybe two was as good as the luck could be. Yeah.

Final question on this. How much of this, when you were reading this, were you thinking of it through the lens of SpaceX now, where I'm not saying that NASA doesn't exist, but essentially what the shuttle program was... Was NASA on its own? All they were really doing was launching satellites and doing science experiments. And that's essentially...

I'm not being reductive here. NASA still does stuff with rockets and things like that. But now NASA is, we're the people that do the science in space. And the getting into space, SpaceX and other... contractors and private, they're the ones that are in charge of that. Are you asking like... Did you find yourself...

Do you think that this is maybe the better model where don't try to do everything? Because you're saying it's this complex thing. Break it up into we're the people that do the rockets. And we're the people that do the science and that sort of thing. I don't know. I don't know if SpaceX is doing anything like nearly as complicated as the space shuttle. So it's kind of hard to say.

What I thought was interesting is like – to the extent that I thought about SpaceX and like the private space companies while reading this book, it was mostly as like a way – like it's kind of amazing that – the government did this in the eighties and like 50 years later, private companies are kind of getting around to it. Um, and, and, um, like SpaceX's biggest rocket is like as large as like the Titan rocket, right? It's like not.

They're not sort of doing something that hadn't been done before. And so I don't know. I got this – I just – A lot of this book sort of sparked a nostalgia for like a previous time when like government got things done. Even though there was this big failure, it seemed like the fact that they built it, the fact that it worked.

The fact that they investigated the accidents, it just seemed like a better functioning society. I think that's a good way to end it because I felt the nostalgia for that too. feeling like the, you catch yourself thinking, well, I thought things were better because I was a kid and everything seems to have rose colored glasses for your childhood or something like that. But yeah, you're really underlying.

Underlining something that I felt too when I was reading this. We should say again for people that want to read this book, it is... Written by, I'm going to have to edit this part. Adam Higginbotham. The book was written by Adam Higginbotham. It's called Challenger, A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. Farhad, would you like to tell us anything? Do you have a book coming out? Where can we find you these days, if nothing else?

I'm basically doing nothing. I took some time off. Must be nice. I may be writing a book. I don't know. I've been doing some writing for Slate. Mostly I'm just on like – I've been reading lots of books and listening to audio books and like spending time with my family, as they say.

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As I end every show, yo, Holmes, smell you later.