I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. Before we dive into this week's episode, a few notes for you. First, next weekend is Memorial Day here in the US, so we'll not have an episode dropping on Friday, May 21st. With the week after that, we're going to have a great episode. It's going to be our next
book club discussion. This one is about the novel James by Percival Everett. If you're interested in listening to that discussion, I urge you to use the next few weeks to catch up on what I think is a pretty great book. Alright, in 2019, our guest on this week's episode published his first book, The Gripping Account of the Accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, and what was then the Soviet Union. That book, Midnight at Chernobyl, was one of the book reviews 10 best books of that year.
He's now out with another account of a disaster that occurred in 1986. This is the explosion of the 25th Space Shuttle Mission, The Challenger. In January of 1986, 73 seconds into its flight, the Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. All seven people aboard were killed, including Christa McCall of the school teacher, who was the first citizen passenger on a NASA flight. Adam Higgin-Batham's new book is called Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster
on the edge of space. Adam, welcome to the Book of View podcast. Thank you for having me. So Adam, what was it about the year 1986? What made you want to turn to this disaster after having worked on Chernobyl for five years or so?
Well, I'm not really just working chronologically or even in gradually through the year 1986, although that is why the Challenger accident came to mind initially, to be honest, which was that when I was promoting the Chernobyl book, I was often asked if I remembered where I was when I heard the news of the accident taking place. And that's what made that I got no idea. I didn't remember exactly where I was. I think partly because of the way the
news leaked out of a secret. Well, I did remember very clearly was where I was when I heard about Challenger, which happened almost exactly three months before Chernobyl. So it was back in my mind when I sat down and started casting around for what I would like to write
my second book about. And as I did so, I began to realize that very similarly to Chernobyl, this was a story that people thought that they knew about and had taken place sufficiently recently that those who lived through it and what I witnessed is to what happened were not only still around, but getting old enough that some of them had already passed away, and would soon do so. And it was an opportunity to write about this event from a new perspective,
but also before it finally slipped away into history. This is your second book in both or taking on these big dramatic historical moments. What's the pleasure you get out of, as a journalist, out of this type of reporting and writing? Well, I think partly that both Chernobyl and Challenger like another famous event like the Titanic sinking, offer an opportunity to gather a snapshot of society at a given inflection point. And they kind of represent this view
from the top to the bottom. So in the case of Chernobyl, one of the protagonists in the story is Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of state, and then it affected people all the way down the chain of Soviet society, all the way down to the lowliest reacting control engineer. And it's the same for Challenger. Ron Reagan is a character, but it goes all the way down to the children of members of the crew who were watching the accident take place from the Root of the Launch Control Center.
And so it offers this slice through society, but it also shows you because it's a disastrous extreme event. It shows you human beings at their best and their worst. Now regarding your last book, Midnight Chernobyl, you talked about the culture of secrecy and lies in the Soviet Union that sort of resulted in this explosion. And you spoke to someone, I think you said you spoke to someone you quoted someone saying that this disaster was 20 years
in the making because of those lies in those secrecy. And I wonder if you started to see as you were working on the early stages of this book, some resonances, not obviously in terms of ideology between those lies and secrecy in the Soviet Union and NASA. Absolutely, although I wouldn't say the same sort of institutional secrecy was the problem. But you know, there was a more subtle pattern of self-deception and there was certainly a lot of
hubris and complacency that led into this accident. And there were individuals who exhibited patterns of secrecy and reluctance to in some cases report and in other cases receive bad news, which was definitely part of the problem in the Soviet Union and part of the problem with the Chernobyl accident. And more broadly, they were both the result of what the sociologist Diane Vaughan who wrote a kind of door stop academic treatise that's just dedicated to the nature of the
Challenger launch decision that came out at the end of the last century. She called the normalization of deviance, which is this idea that in complex decision-making processes like those leading to the Chernobyl accident and the Challenger disaster, you know, those concerned with making the decisions start off with a series of extremely carefully governed and defined practices
for what constitutes acceptable risk and normal behaviour. But then gradually over time, they subtly and almost unconsciously expand what they deemed to be acceptable without even realizing it. So that months or years down the line, they've started to accept engineering standards in the case of the shuttle disaster that to an outsider coming in cold would be obviously extremely
dangerous. And so they can they kind of Richard Feynman who ultimately served on the Rogers Commission examining what happened set afterwards that he felt that they fooled themselves. You mentioned this this door stopper of a book that you just read. The bibliography in the back of your book as well as the list of interviews speak to the number of people that have spoken about this already. The number of books have been written documentaries have been made.
What why did you hope to bring with this account given that it's been pretty well documented and a lot of people have their own memories because we saw it in real time of what happened that day. Again, it's similar to what I discovered when I started working on the Chernobyl book, which is that you're right. I mean, there's been an enormous amount written, an enormous amount of television
coverage and films have been made about this. But what the two stories have in common is that a lot of that writing in particular was either academic or technical in nature or were individual memoirs. And so there's a vast collection of material out there. But what I realized very quickly was that nobody since the immediate aftermath of the accident when there were two books published by
journalists who were there at the time giving accounts of what happened. Nobody in the almost 40 years since has made a serious attempt to write a narrative nonfiction account that explains what happened from beginning to end as a story that takes in all of that information. Plus the stuff that's been in archives that nobody has really looked at. And the other material that I've gathered myself not only from archival sources, but also from talking to eye witnesses who, if approached in 1987,
may not have talked at all and certainly may not have been completely frank. So there was a lot of of a lot of opportunity there. And what I discovered once I began the research was there was also a lot of parts of the story that haven't been told before. You alluded to this before, but you didn't say where were you? Well, I was a schoolboy in England at the time. So because of the time difference and because I was at school in England, I certainly wasn't watching it live like hundreds
of thousands of American grade school children. And I was at school and after school that day, I went out with my friends to the pub. And then when I got home late that night, my mother told me that it had happened because she'd seen it on the news. So it wasn't until late in the day that I heard about it. But I do remember exactly how staggered I was at the news that this had happened. And I think that part of the reason that the story is worth revisiting at this point is not only
because there are so many people who weren't even alive at the time the accident happened. But if you went around at the time, it's hard to conceive of exactly how shocking it was that this organization NASA that had built this amazing reputation for being able to constantly do things so audacious and technically sophisticated that they seemed almost impossible. And to do those
things again and again, that something like this could have happened. A catastrophe like this seemed literally inconceivable, which is part of the reason why when you go back and you look at the footage shot on the ground, a cake and avalanche at the time, what happens when the shuttle disintegrates in front of these crowds of thousands of people is not that there's immediate shock
and upset. But people are kind of silent. Some people cheer because they think that this is an expected part of the process of a center space because it just seemed inconceivable. Now you say the American, certainly the American perception of NASA at that time was of an agency that could do anything at this point. But you open the book after a pre-prologue with the Apollo One tragedy, which is something that happened in 1967. And I wonder why that was the right place to
start this book. Precisely because in 1986, people had come to imagine that NASA was an infallible institution. And part of the reason for that was that although they had indeed had this one terrible tragedy in which three astronauts died on the launch pad in a fire, their subsequent successes two years later, they landed two men on the moon, eclipse that. And people by 1969 had begun to forget even that tragedy in 1967, which kind of threatened to upend the space
program and the agency completely. But they were so successful subsequently that it began to the memories of that, the lessons of that began to dim not only in the memories of people of NASA, but in the population at large. And then moreover, the next time they had they came extremely close to tragedy with Apollo 13. Then they managed to succeed once again with ingenuity and bravery to pull that back from the brink of disaster and rescue these men from explosion in deep space.
And so the way that was remembered and conceived of and represented at the time was not of a terrible tragedy, but of what they called a successful failure. So that helped to build this mythos of the infallible group of slide rule wielding engineers who could do anything. I get the sense, however, certainly with the space shuttle program, which I want to ask you about the early days of in a second, that as you sketch out at least it was always on the edge of disaster.
Yeah, I mean, because the truth is that that space flight is extremely dangerous. And really, is it weird to say something so obvious, but haven't seemed surprising to people because we've gotten so used to space travel, but it is experimental, space, experimental vehicles that we are using that have only been tested up to certain points.
Right, but we've been doing it. It seems to us as laymen, a relatively long time, but also there has been historically a real gulf between the understanding that the rocket engineers and the astronauts themselves have of exactly how dangerous it is and the fact that it is experimental. And the way that politicians and administrators at NASA represent that to the public. In the case of the spatial in particular, the way that was sold was that it was going to be the
routineization of space. And so the space shuttle was going to be this thrifty space truck that was going to make flying into orbit as simple, straightforward and routine as getting on an airliner. And that's why they ended up with the space flight participant program, the inaugural passenger for which was the teacher in space because they'd got this shirt sleeve environment. Astronauts no longer wore these bulky pressure suits and helmets. They didn't,
you could go up into space easily. And with such safety, apparently, that a school teacher from New Hampshire could be taking along as a passenger. One of the dynamics that you discuss early on in the space shuttle program, which was conceived, the earliest ideas conceived right around the time of the Apollo mission to the moon was that it was pretty significantly underfunded from its earliest days because of political pressures that as you write the Nixon administration had their
office of management and budget. And they thought this was too expensive. It went into the Carter administration. Do we need the space shuttle? And by the time the first one launched in 1981, the impression I got from your reporting is that they never had enough money. They never had enough money. And there was this constant pension of function versus cost, safety versus cost. And those eventually were key factors that five years later would lead to the first space shuttle
disaster. The numbers are pretty bracing. NASA originally went to the Nixon administration in the early 70s and they asked for the $14 billion they said would be necessary to build even the most limited version of this spacecraft. And the office of management and budget had a look at that figures and they came back and they said no, not $14 billion. You can have five and a half. So from the outset, it was almost impossible to make that happen.
Let's talk about the challenger, which is one of the four shuttles that NASA at the time. Yeah, they have had four shells. And again, a lot of people have a certain age. Remember seeing it, they remember the news coverage. They remember phrase O-rings, but they primarily, I imagine, remember Christmacoliffe, who was the first person in the space participant program, which was announced by President Reagan in 1984, when he directed NASA to look for a teacher,
to be the first citizen passenger. And with no disrespect to any of the other participants on the flight, I think that her position on that space shuttle was one of the reasons, in addition to it, having happened on live TV. That's so many people remember it and hold it as a tragedy inside of
them. What you've just described is also part of the reason I wanted to write this book was because so many previous accounts have concentrated on her almost to the exclusion of the other six members of the crew, each of whom have had these amazing stories that brought them to the launch pad that day, which even I, after I've been researching it for a while, could still keep finding these kind of
surprising details about them. So I think that the presence of Christmacoliffe on the flight is what makes the Challenger disaster, what made the Challenger disaster at the time resonate so powerfully in the minds of all Americans. There's a statistic that an estimated 95% of American adults by the end of
January the 28th, 1986 had seen the footage of the explosion replayed on television. And one of the reasons that that was such a shattering experience for so many people was, we call it really represented a sort of every man's dream of being a participant in spaceflight. The fact that she could be a
passenger meant that anybody could. And so I think that people really identified with her not only because as an individual, she was this kind of extraordinarily charismatic person who people's fell in love with from Johnny Carson to Ronald Reagan, but also because people personally identified with her presence as a passenger on the space shuttle. What did you discover about the other participants on the challenge or flight that was particularly interesting for you as a researcher
and a journalist? I mean, one of the characters that and these are real people, but one of the people that popped the most to me was Ron McNair, who just seemed like one of the most fascinating people that's ever lived is an astronaut. He's a karate expert. He played the saxophoned space. He just said all these levels to him, what an amazing person. I mean, to be honest, I've the fact that Ron McNair is not kind of a name on everyone's lips that everyone knows about
and is not being the subject of his own kind of biopic. I just I found kind of a standing as you write. He's a guy who grew up one of three children in Lake City, South Carolina. And as a boy, he and his elder brother picked cotton in the fields near where he lived to make a bit of extra money. But then he went on to from this background, he went on to to get a doctorate in laser physics from MIT. He was, as you say, a black belt karate expert who not only dedicated himself to learning
to this himself, but then went into to local communities and taught kids to do karate. He then joined NASA, became the second African-American in space. And then in the month leading up to the challenge mission, he entered into this agreement with the French electronic musician, Jean Michel Jard, to perform a song that Jard had written specially for him in orbit on
challenger using a special small saxophone that he was going to take with him. And that this would be recorded live, downlinked from space by Jard and then incorporated into a forthcoming performance that he was going to do to celebrate the anniversary of the establishment of Houston in 1986. Amazing guy. Yeah, yeah. We'll be right back.
Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm here with Adam Higginbatham, the author of Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. His new book, which tells the tale of the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. There is so much technical reporting in here, technical language, Adam, in the same way as your last book about Chernobyl had pages upon pages about nuclear power plant technology. Don't say that. You'll
frighten people off. But there's always a button. I wouldn't introduce that without a button, which is much like with Midnight Chernobyl. I read this book incredibly fast and I'm wondering how you work in order to make sure that both for you and the reader technical concepts are presented in a way that are incredibly easy to grasp and understand. I like to think that reader, I do the arduous work so that you don't have to. The way that it works is extremely difficult, which is
that first of all, I have to understand it. I am not a scientist or an engineer. Indeed, my middle school physics teacher would be absolutely a gassed learn that I wrote a book, which a pretty significant element of which is nuclear fission. What I do is I try and read as much as I possibly can to understand how these concepts work and then try and put something on the page.
And then I get help from people who actually know what they're talking about. So in the case of both Chernobyl book and this book, I would draft sections of it and then I would run them by experts. So in this case, Brian Russell, who was one of the engineers at Morton Thargold, who worked on the rocket program and was present in the fateful late night teleconference
tonight before the launch when they tried to have it called off. He actually reviewed all of the sections that I wrote about the solid rocket boosters and the O-rings in order to make sure that
as far as possible, I didn't get anything wrong. But the most significant element of that really is that what I try to do is to reduce the amount of technical information in the narrative to the absolute bare minimum that's necessary for you to be able to as a reader to be able to understand not only what's happening, but the significance of specific events when they occur. So you don't get lost in the weeds. You have a you have the basic understanding and it but it
has has been simplified. So in the case of the Chernobyl book, I have the help of Frank von Hippel, who's a Euclif physicist at Princeton and I would send him these passages that I'd written. And he would write back and say, well, this is hopelessly oversimplified. Are you a version of how an RPM carry out towards hopelessly oversimplified? And I'd have to say, well, okay, Frank, oversimplified fine, but is it wrong? And he'd be like, well, that's the point.
Yes, is it wrong? Is it, well, no, yes, not wrong. And then fine, okay, we're good to go. If it's not wrong, it's oversimplified. Perfect. The space shuttle is composed of four parts essentially, which is the the craft, the lander, the thing that actually flies and comes back to earth, the fuel tank, which is the huge orange thing that it sits on before launch. And then the two solid rocket boosters, the white ones that
sort of sit on the side of the fuel tank. And as you write, two minutes into the flight and an altitude of nearly 27 miles, the two solid rockets, their propellant spent, would soon separate from the spacecraft, ending the most hazardous part of the ascent. Why were the first two minutes of any space shuttle launch up to this point the most dangerous? Because the space shuttle was the first time that solid rocket technology had ever been used to propel manned
spacecraft for NASA into space. And the reason for that was the unlike the liquid engines that were used on all of the Apollo missions and all of the missions that came before that. They couldn't be turned off or throttled down or throttled up once they'd been lit. They were effectively in principle like giant Roman candles where you would just light the fuse and then they fire and then they keep going in the direction they're pointed until the fuel burns out and only then
can they safely be jettisoned. And one of the compromises that was made when the space shuttle was in the design process was that unlike also unlike other previous manned spacecraft that NASA constructed, the space shuttle would have no separate escape system for the astronauts
to escape during the course of the ascent to orbit. So the approach that NASA took given that you couldn't control or turn off these rockets and that you couldn't escape from the spacecraft was that the solid rockets would simply have to function with 100% reliability. So they would have to work perfectly every time for that two minutes of flight. That made it
extremely hazardous. And as we know and as I know from Reenier book and maybe as obvious now following the challenger disaster, they weren't perfect and not only were they not perfect and not only were they not 100% reliable. But for years leading up to the disaster, there had been problems we know now in the solid rocket boosters. And this is one of the sort of technical things that you
make very legible, which is this conversation about joints and O-rings. And I think everyone who read the news in 1986 and lived through it probably remembers this phrase and remembers hearing about it on the news, remembers hearing about it coming out of all the testimony that occurred in Congress in the months afterwards. But why did the challenger blow up?
Because these solid rockets that were absolutely massive, 100 feet high, had to be built in sections because they would be almost impossible to successfully transport if they were built as a monolithic cylinder. And this meant that they were constructed at the factory of Montyre-Gole in Utah and then transported it in these sections all the way across the country, where they were delivered to the vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And there they would be
stacked warm on top of the other until they formed the fully formed rocket. So there were these field joints, this is what the engineers called them, that formed the joints between each of these sections. And those sections fitted together in what they call the tang and cleavus joint, which is a bit like the tongue and groove joint between floorboards, for example.
But then in order to make the seal between those joints as tight as possible, they packed those joints with fireproof putty and with a pair of official rubber o-rings, which encircled the joint and in theory made it gas tight. And the reason it had to be gas tight was that the solid propellant burning inside the rockets could otherwise escape through the joint
if there was any kind of leak. And the engineers knew all too well that if there was a bit of a leak in one of these joints, the propellant was burning at somewhere in excess of 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit. And if there was a leak, what would happen is this little tongue of flame that would leak through the joint would burn through the half inch steel, a half inch thick steel casing of the rocket
like a blowtorch and catastrophe would ensue. You write about the years of realization on the part of the rocket booster contractor, or at least certain people at the contractor, that these o-rings, these giant rubber circles that were made to fit in these joints in order to prevent gas from leaking were not performing as they were meant to. And that had been happening for a while.
And the thing that precipitated the Challenger disaster was not only that, but the second 100 year frost event essentially that descended upon Florida in January 1986, right before the Challenger was about to take off. And while rubber does what it's supposed to do in normal temperatures above a certain degree Fahrenheit, when it gets very cold, rubber, this rubber at least did not perform as it was supposed to. It did not expand in order on the way
that it should in order to fill the joint. It compressed, it was brittle, and it was useless. Right. But one of the rocket engineers, the surviving rocket engineers who worked on the design of these things, told me that the fault in the solid rocket boosters were so fundamental, the joint itself was so badly designed that whether it had been cold or not, there was going to be a catastrophe at some point. It so happened that the precipitating event
in this case was cold weather. But he was very clear with me that the joint was so badly designed that it was going to end up in disaster at some point. Now that the one of the real tragedies of this is that as you say, they had a warning of the fact that the cold would make the existing faults in these joints worse. Almost exactly a year before in January 1985, they had what was regarded as a 100 year weather event when they had some of the coldest weather on the launch pad
at launch of the space shuttle discovery. And the night before it had been the coldest weather in Florida history. And one of the engineers at Morton Thierkall, when he examined the recovered solid rockets that had parachuted into the ocean at the end of their flight, was absolutely horrified by what he saw. He saw evidence of leaks of a kind that he had never seen before, despite the fact that these engineers had been seeing these kind of this evidence of erosion in the joints
for years before this flight took place. This was something much more serious. And so he immediately went to his superiors at the Marshall Space Flight Center. And part of what I came across in the research for the book was a 600 page memoir written by this guy, Roger Bojolet, who was one of the former experts Thierkall on the joints. And he explains in his memoir that he gave this presentation to a packed room at Marshall and explained what he'd found and explained the leaks.
And then at the end, he very reluctantly said, now guys, I know that you're probably not going to want to hear this. But it's my belief that the precipitating event in this new phenomenon that I've discovered was temperature. And he writes that when he said that, the room was completely silent for a few seconds. And then from the very back of the room, somewhere out of sight to him, he heard a voice say, you're right, Roger. We don't want to hear it. And that continued to be his
experience for another year. He desperately tried to draw people's attention to the fact that there was something really wrong with these joints. And Morton Thierkall did actually form a task force to study the problem. But the truth is that not only all the other engineers there, but Bojolet himself believed that because this had been a hundred year weather event, they were going to have time to fix the joint before anything catastrophic happened. And it wasn't until the eve of the launch
because he was then focused on trying to fix this stuff. And he wasn't really focused on what was going on with the continuing missions. He didn't really know anything about the Challenger launch until the morning before the launch took place. When somebody told him that there was this weather forecast that the weather in Florida was going to fall to as low as 18 degrees Fahrenheit. At which point he thought to himself, I have to stop this launch.
One of the most shot, I mean, there are a lot of shocking things in here. One of the more shocking things to me was the idea, and this is addressed after the disaster by some astronauts that none of this information was ever shared, not only with the Challenger, but generally space shuttle information with any of the people who were occupying the capsule who were flying up there just was not part of the process to give any information to the people whose lives were
on the line. Right. And actually some of the engineers involved in trying to fix the problem were reassured by their assumption that these flight readiness reviews of the kind that they all attended that would go over problems with previous shuttle flights before the next one was launched were all attended by the astronauts. And they were wrong about that. The astronauts
very rarely, if ever, attended these meetings. And on the rare occasions when they did, any problems with the earrings that were mentioned were made to sound as if they were in what the words of one of them no big deal. I think someone, this is towards the end of the book says, gives the parallel basically, if you told me that a plane was going to fly and its wing was about to fall off, the pilot would probably want to know. Right. That was just not NASA's way of
sharing information with its astronauts. Well, I mean, it's, that is true. That was General Donald Kutino, who was actually a member of the Rogers Commission investigation. And he'd like many other members of the commission were absolutely aghast when they discovered the sort of the trail of missed warnings that preceded the accident. That's not to suggest that these engineers weren't concerned with safety. It was just that the problems with the o-rings seemed
like there was something that they were at work on fixing. They believed that they understood them. They believed that they were making a correct assessment of acceptable risk. Right. It wasn't that they were blindly going ahead and recklessly knowingly gambling with the lives of astronauts. They just overestimated their own competence and they were arrogant. And was there arrogance as a result of sort of the, as you say, the sheen that NASA had built up
around itself? I got the impression that it partly was. And one of the things that was interesting to me about it, particularly given where I work, was the way in which NASA and the media had this interplay. So the early days of NASA getting the astronauts on TV and media ready and having everyone being able to see the landing on the moon was part of the thing that built up this
agency's reputation. By the time we get to the space shuttle, I feel like the agency needed good headlines in a way to continue to justify its shuttle missions, both to the government that was, was trying to ask for money into the public as well. Part of the reason that the astronaut teacher program was approved, it seems, was in order to continue to show people that. And I'm curious about how you see that pushing pull between this agency and all the media organizations.
I mean, I dropped my book almost when I saw that readers digest at a space correspondent at one point. Yeah. Those were different media tastes. I mean, one of the surprising things, to be honest, about, about researching this was when I discovered just how amazingly well-resourced and staffed all of these national media organizations were, all of the newspapers that sent teams down to Cape Canaveral after the accident to spend months covering the disaster. It's kind of remarkable.
But it's one of the things that is left behind this extraordinary resource of information about
what happened. It hasn't really been drawn on in the years since. But what you're talking about, I think, is part of what I came to think of as sort of the original sin of NASA, which is that as an agency, they came to believe very early on that in order for their programs to continue, in order for the agencies to continue, certainly in the wake of the moon program, they needed enormous public enthusiasm and engagement in order to keep winning congressional approval for
their budgets in order to keep getting money. And so they needed to constantly present the public
with new and more audacious efforts to take. And that's really at the core of the tragedy because while there were many senior members of the organization that continued to believe this, one former NASA administrator Bob Frosh, who was the person who made the shuttle program come to fruition under Carter, told me that he recognized at the time that in truth, public engagement was not necessary for them to continue to get money because the military significance of what NASA was doing
was so great that Congress would always fund it. As we get in the third section of the book towards the actual disaster itself, I found my look, we all know what's going to happen, but I found myself, there's not exaggerations looking away. I didn't, I wanted to keep going, but I also didn't want to
keep going because I knew where it was going to end up eventually. And that is a result of the events themselves, but also as a result of how you structure essentially the cross cutting, the events that are happening, there is rising tension and you are a nonfiction writer. And I wonder what your thoughts are as you're writing this about like the, what are the ethics of writing tension about this terrible tragedy that I'm doing here? I actually found those sections of a book very hard to
write. And I realized in retrospect that because I wrote almost entirely in chronological order that I actually delayed writing those sections of the book for as long as I could. And that was partly because during the course of the reporting and the research, I got to know the families of the crew, in some cases quite well, to the extent that I really felt that I came to know members of the crew well enough to kind of understand what kind of people they were and understand
what family life with them was like, at least. And that I didn't want to be in a weird way responsible for killing them. In terms of the ethics of it, I mean, I think that I don't think that any member of the crew's families would want the lessons of a desire to like this and the consequences of it. And what was lost in the challenger accident to go for gone. So I think that there's is whether it's tense or not, I think that laying out the reality of what this means to the people
involved is a worthwhile endeavor. Difficult as it might be to do and to read. What do you think you've learned about organizations, about groups of people after writing these two books that are grounded in? As I said, two different sort of ideological environments, but the thing that they both shared is that these disasters came out in some way out of
organizational failures. Well, I mean, there is a sort of institutional interpretation of how these failures come about, which is what Diane Wallens book is really about.
It's about that idea of the normalization of deviance and of sorts of group think. But what I found when I began looking into the archival material and talking to the individuals who were there at the time was that no matter how big the organization gets and no matter how complex and broken internal communication might become, these events are always going to come down to individual
human beings and individual human frailty. And to me, one of the most arresting moments of the research was when I realized that the decision in this late night teleconference had took place the night before the launch. There's a moment where the head of engineering at Morton Firecold is asked to be the fourth member of the senior engineering team to vote on whether or not to reverse their pre-existing recommendation. And that recommendation was not to fly.
And his three colleagues, including his boss, have already said that, yes, despite listening to their own engineers presenting all of this data about how they believe that cold weather was going to make launching extremely dangerous, they would reverse their recommendation because they definitely got the impression that NASA did not want them to say that they didn't want to fly.
And there's this terrible moment when this guy who is boil account, so well like colleague an excellent engineer is sitting in this conference room and all eyes in the room turn on him. And it's clear from the way that other people who are there at the time describe his behavior, is he looks desperately around the room for support for someone. He kind of starts to get up from his chair, he wipes a hand across his face. And in the end, he just doesn't have the spine to stand
up to the pressure of everyone else in the room. And he just throws his hands up in the air and he says, okay, let's fire. And from that point onwards, it was too late. So these sort of individual personal decisions, sometimes that disasters like this can come about. Exactly. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the Book Review Podcast, a fascinating book, challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. Really appreciate you
coming up. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with Adam Higginboth, author of Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening.