Summary of Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space E-Book
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SUMMARY OF ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM’S BOOK
A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
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Summary of Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
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PROLOGUE
Space Shuttle mission 51-L faced another delay due to freezing temperatures in Florida and two-foot icicles hanging from the gantry. Steve Nesbitt, chief commentator for Mission Control, had been with NASA public affairs for just over five years and was there for the triumph of the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981. Since then, he had become chief commentator for Mission Control and delivered live commentary from Houston on almost every one of the twenty-four shuttle ights.
Nesbitt had access to realtime information about the spacecraft through his headset, listening in to audio loops connecting groups of NASA engineers and flight controllers on the internal communications network. He had his regular preferences: "Flight Ops Procedures" and the "Trajectory" display, which showed its speed, altitude, and downrange distance.
At 11:38 in the morning, Nesbitt saw the numbers on his screen start to move and a few seconds later keyed his mic to speak: "Good roll program confirmed. Challenger now heading downrange." At sixty-eight seconds, Nesbitt reported the next key moment on the list in front of him: "Engines beginning throttling down, now at 94 percent."
At one minute and ten seconds into ight, Nesbitt heard a loud crackle in his headphones and saw Challenger abruptly obscured by a ball of orange and white ame. The astronaut Richard Covey confirmed the change with the shuttle commander: "Challenger, go at throttle up."
A few moments of quiet extended into half a minute, and an agonizing silence enveloped the NASA commentary loop. On the TV screen, the cloud drifted in the wind and fragments of debris uttered toward the ocean. The Flight Director polled his team in vain for answers. It was forty-one seconds before Steve Nesbitt spoke again, saying that "flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation," indicating a major malfunction.
PART ONE
The Last Man on the Moon
FIRE ON PAD 34
Martha Chaee, a widow, was amidst the chaos of her husband Roger Collins' absence from Cape Canaveral training. On January 27, 1967, Collins was found alone at her doorstep, solemn and alone. The three astronauts, Roger Chaee, Ed White, and Gus Grissom, were assigned to the crew of Apollo 1, NASA's first manned test flight in the new rocket program.
At the time of their assignment, the space race with the Soviet Union was entering a white-knuckle phase. NASA had not yet managed to put a human into Earth orbit, but had suffered humiliations at the hands of the Soviets. Over the next five years, a growing team of scientists, engineers, and technicians achieved a series of developmental leaps that enabled NASA to close the gap with the Soviet program.
John Glenn became the first American in orbit in 1962, Ed White embarked on his space walk in 1965, and the crews of Gemini VI and Gemini VII made the first successful orbital rendezvous. In June 1966, Surveyor 1, a three-legged robot spacecraft, made the first American controlled landing on the lunar surface.
However, the obstacles to sending men to walk on the moon and returning them safely to Earth remained daunting. The technology necessary to accomplish the task, such as the massive Saturn V rockets, Apollo capsules, and the insect-like lander, was still being designed and built, and the process was proving fraught with problems.
In 1966, astronauts Chaee, Grissom, and White attended a Customer Acceptance Readiness Review conference in California to discuss the design and manufacturing of their Apollo capsule. The meeting was intended as the final step before North American shipped the capsule to Florida for handover to NASA. The capsule faced numerous problems, including poor design and shoddy workmanship. The crew recognized that they were placing their lives in the hands of government contractors who were often inventing space travel technology.
Although some of the astronauts were skilled pilots, many were technicians with expertise in aeronautical engineering and celestial mechanics. They were involved in helping devise design changes and revisions to the equipment that would carry them toward the moon. Gus Grissom, the Apollo 1 commander, was deeply concerned by what he saw at Downey: poor design and shoddy workmanship plagued the capsule.
The main hatch design was clumsy, three-layer, and could not be jettisoned in an emergency by explosive charges. The astronauts detested the hatch design and lobbied to have it replaced with one that could be quickly and easily opened from the inside. Joe Shea refused, citing too much money and not enough time.
During the Acceptance Readiness Review meeting, the discussion focused mainly on minor glitches or issues that had been discussed before. One point late in the day, the attention turned to the question of ammable materials in the cockpit. Since the beginning of the space program, astronauts had used nylon netting and strips of Velcro to corral checklists and pieces of equipment that might otherwise fall beneath their couches during tests or oat around in zero gravity.
Pure oxygen, pressurized at launch to more than sixteen pounds per square inch, had been used in space capsules by NASA since the Mercury days for both engineering and medical reasons. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that the one-man Mercury capsules were so small that any re starting inside would burn up the available oxygen supply in a few seconds and then extinguish itself.
In July 1963, NASA reported that a number of non-ammable materials, even human skin, would burst into ame in tests of the pure-oxygen atmosphere. However, this was considered an "acceptable risk" due to the complex engineering compromises necessary to build a capsule light and practical enough to carry three men to the moon on an almost impossible deadline without unduly endangering the lives of the crew. The contingency plan outlined in the 1963 document was simple: "Fires in the spacecraft must be precluded at all costs."
During the Readiness Review meeting in Downey, Joe Shea engaged in a few minutes of back-and-forth with the North American engineers before repeating the rules and issuing an instruction to clean up any Velcro and anything else that might feed a potential fire. Gus Grissom, Chaee, and White signed two prints of a photograph showing them, Chaee, and White sitting at a scale model of the Apollo capsule.
At the outset of 1967, Joe Shea was on the verge of becoming a celebrity as a public speaker and hobnobbing with CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite. Now the editors of Time magazine were preparing a cover story on him timed to coincide with the launch of the first manned Apollo mission. The spacecraft was still far from ready, with problems in the environmental control system, damaged service modules, and more Velcro and nylon netting than ever in the cockpit.
Gus Grissom became increasingly angry about the condition of Spacecraft 012 and the flight simulator on which he and the crew were supposed to be training. He felt his warnings were going unheard, and NASA managers and astronauts were in the grip of "Go' Fever," the desperate drive to push on toward a launch and keep to the schedule, regardless of the problems.
As Christmas approached, three astronauts, Roger Chaee, White, and Chaee, returned to their families in Houston. They had created a special Apollo pin for their wives as a surprise on their return from space, but instead, they gave them Christmas gifts. By the new year, they had devised new mementos to carry into orbit for their wives: three gold charms, tiny replicas of the Apollo 1 spacecraft, each made unique by setting a single diamond representing the position the astronauts would occupy in the capsule.
On January 27, the three astronauts stepped out of the elevator onto the scarlet-painted gantry of Pad 34 for a practice countdown, the full dress rehearsal of the launch of Apollo 1, known as the "plugs-out test." The location was chosen as their gateway to the moon less than six years earlier, and the Kennedy Space Center had risen from the wilderness with prodigious speed. The weather was perfect for the test, with clear, warm, and bright conditions.
The plugs-out test was a demanding and complex rehearsal, conducted on a huge scale, involving not just the astronauts and the pad support staff at Cape Canaveral but also thousands of engineers and contractors behind the consoles there and almost nine hundred miles away, back at Mission Control in Houston. The test was designed to check that each system of the spacecraft and its booster worked as intended without actually igniting the engines. Gus Grissom planned to practice an emergency escape from the capsule to meet the February launch date. Despite its complexity, few at NASA regarded the test as dangerous, as the Saturn booster would not be fueled with any of its volatile propellant.
The pad crew of Spacecraft 012 struggled to seal the hatches, resulting in the astronauts being locked inside the capsule. The atmosphere was purged with pure oxygen and increased to 16.7 pounds per square inch, forcing the inner hatch against its sills. As the countdown continued, problems with the environmental control system triggered the master alarm, and radio communication between the capsule and ground controllers continued to break down.
At 6:20 p.m., with just ten minutes to go before the simulated launch time, the controllers put the countdown on hold, and Grissom began swapping out pieces of equipment to isolate the fault. By 6:30 p.m., the astronauts had spent over five hours in the malfunctioning capsule, and launch control was preparing to resume the countdown.
Grissom was seething, wondering how they would get to the moon if they couldn't talk between three buildings. Ed White, who was in exasperation, cut in to tell the controllers that they couldn't hear anything. After a few seconds, ground controllers in Cape Canaveral and Houston heard a single, clipped exclamation coming over the VHF channel named Black-3.
Ed White's hands reached above his head, toward the hatch dog bolts. The blaze spread from inside the far left of the cockpit toward the porthole, and the crew was forced to crawl through the heat and choking smoke so thick they could barely see. Roger Chaee remained strapped to his couch, where he had kept communications open until the end.
The pad leader retreated from the stricken spacecraft and picked up the headset connecting him to the blockhouse below, unwilling to reveal the truth over an open channel.
WHITEY ON THE MOON
The Apollo 1 mission was the most lethal accident in the short history of the US space program, and the nation reeled in shock as the disaster pulled back the curtain on the technicolor adventure that to the public had begun to seem routine. Four days after the crash, TV viewers across the country watched live as a caisson drawn by six black horses bore Gus Grissom's ag-draped coffin to a burial plot at the crest of a hill in Arlington National Cemetery. That afternoon, the body of Roger Chaee was lowered into the same frost-covered ground in the plot beside his mission commander.
Back at Cape Canaveral, an investigation of the crash began almost at once, as stunned managers from NASA and its contractors converged on the scene aboard planes from Houston and Washington, DC. Joseph Shea, who was determined to protect his agency from outside scrutiny, took the lead in the inquiry. At the end of a ten-week probe, NASA's board of inquiry delivered a report that stretched to six parts and more than three thousand pages. Their findings revealed shocking incompetence, describing "many deficiencies in design and engineering, manufacture and quality control" of the Apollo spacecraft. They found that NASA personnel "failed to give adequate attention to certain mundane but equally vital questions of crew safety."
The intensity of the blaze, which had reached temperatures high enough to melt aluminum, had incinerated so much of the cabin of Spacecraft 012, making it impossible to prove conclusively how it had begun. The evidence suggested that it started with a short circuit caused by worn insulation on a wire in the cable bundles tangled near Gus Grissom's feet, close to a leak in the pipework carrying ethylene glycol around the troubled environmental control system. The three men died not from burns sustained in the blaze but from asphyxiation—within seventeen seconds of the blaze starting, the intense heat melted their oxygen hoses, and ventilation fans sucked smoke and toxic gas into their pressure suits.
The Apollo program faced a significant setback after the tragedy, with the possibility of landing men on the moon before 1970 appearing slim. NASA chiefs assured that they would honor the three astronauts' sacrifices only in reaching the moon. However, Congress launched an investigation into the accident, accusing the Apollo engineers of "criminal negligence." Administrator Webb testified that space exploration represented a zenith of human aspiration and that the moon should remain a shared goal for all Americans.
It took over a year for the Apollo program to regain momentum, and it was not until August 1968 that engineers delivered another spacecraft to Pad 34, ready to take men into orbit. The capsule had been rebuilt, stripped of ammable material, and modified to accommodate a mixed-gas atmosphere. Management of both NASA and North American was overhauled, and a separate bureaucracy was created to impose more stringent safety standards on the spacecraft.
The spirit and attitude of the engineers who would go on to take Apollo to the moon changed significantly. The young engineers at NASA realized that things could possibly go wrong and that accidents would happen. Those with backgrounds in missile industry and systems engineering were hit hard by the disaster, while those from the world of flight testing were prepared to live with the consequences.
Joseph Shea, who was believed to be traumatized by the deaths, remained in charge of the Apollo spacecraft program until the eve of the first congressional hearings. He resigned from NASA four months later, embittered by his treatment but tortured by his role in the deaths of Grissom, Chaee, and White.
On December 14, 1972, Gene Cernan walked on the moon as the last of only a dozen men to do so. The lunar exploration program had been canceled, and Cernan was the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon. US TV networks carried live pictures of the Apollo 17 mission, but viewers called the CBS switchboard in frustration.
The American people became tired of watching men walk on the moon, and NASA technicians were working to recover from the deaths on Pad 34. The moon project was often eclipsed by strife at home and abroad, and the nation was drawn more inextricably into the horrors of Vietnam and the struggle over civil rights. The headlines of 1968 were dominated by the catastrophes of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and nationwide riots that followed.
In December 1969, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first men to reach lunar orbit, and an estimated 600 million people watched live on television. Vice President Spiro Agnew laid out his timetable to land an American on Mars in 1986. However, NASA was undergoing what would prove the first of many cutbacks. By the end of the decade, the extraordinary success of the project had been matched only by its exorbitant cost. A series of equipment failures and narrow escapes made the engineers in charge of the program increasingly nervous.
A growing public disillusionment with technology and the conviction that the exploits of a group of homogeneously square-jawed and uniformly white pilots and scientists on a rock a quarter of a million miles away in space were doing nothing for ordinary Americans facing rising deprivation and economic hardship back on Earth began to wane with each subsequent lunar landing.
On the eve of Armstrong and Aldrin's departure for the moon, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine was confronted by a march led by civil rights leader Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who protested at the inhuman squandering of federal funds. The money spent launching the gleaming rocket could have been better spent addressing the poverty of Black Americans. NASA Administrator Thomas Paine suggested that the moon shot could inspire people to come together to solve the nation's wider problems. However, the myth of the perfect astronaut was shattered forever.
By the time Gene Cernan lifted off from Cape Kennedy in December 1972, public engagement with the space program had fallen so far that ABC, NBC, and CBS had no plans to screen any coverage of the mission at all. Back in Houston, the visionary architects of Apollo had made swashbuckling plans for the next stage of man's exploration of the universe—including a permanent base on the moon, an orbiting space station accommodating a crew of one hundred, a reusable spacecraft to shuttle astronauts up to it from Earth, and a pair of massive nuclear-powered rockets to take a dozen men on a yearslong expedition to Mars.
In January 1972, the new Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, James Fletcher, arrived in Southern California for a midmorning appointment at the President's oceanfront mansion in San Clemente. He and his deputy carried brieng documents and a white plastic model of the new vehicle that they hoped would ensure the future of manned space flight and of NASA itself. Nixon's formal statement blessing the project had already been printed and stacked, ready for distribution to reporters waiting in a nearby hotel.
THE SPACEPLANE
On April 1, 1969, twenty leading engineers at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston were summoned to a meeting to prepare for Apollo 10. The meeting was attended by Maxime Faget, the center's Director of Engineering and Development. Faget was considered a genius due to his imaginative leaps in spacecraft design, sketched out on ordinary graph paper. He was known for his improvised aerodynamic experiments and was admired by colleagues.
Born in British Honduras, Faget came from an old Louisiana family with roots in France. After serving on submarines in the Pacific at the end of World War II, he was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1946. At NACA, he worked on a research program exploring rocket-powered hypersonic flight and developed the concept for the capsule that would take the first astronauts into space during the Mercury program.
The problem engineers faced was to devise a rudimentary spacecraft that could carry a single human being, be light enough to be launched on top of one of the US Army missiles available for the purpose, yet able to protect the astronaut from the intense aerodynamic heating the vehicle would experience on the way back into Earth's atmosphere. Faget's fellow engineers at the Ames Research Center in California discovered that the most effective design for ballistic missile warheads was a blunt, curved shape. This work inspired Faget to conceive his simple but brilliant design for the Mercury capsule: a squat cone that would be launched into space pointing upward on top of a rocket but maintain its attitude to present its blunt end to the Earth as it reentered the atmosphere.
In 1969, Max Faget, the principal creative force behind the development of the Apollo spacecraft, developed an initial concept for a reusable winged spacecraft. Faget built a prototype Space Shuttle, which was three feet long and made from balsa wood, glue, and translucent brown paper. The prototype displayed an elegant aerodynamic design for a spaceplane, presenting its broad underside to diuse the extreme heat of reentry and tilting nose-down to glide through Earth's atmosphere like a conventional plane.
The technological challenges of devising the Apollo program were dwarfed by those of building the Space Shuttle. Armstrong and Aldrin's journey to the lunar surface required them to break free of Earth's gravity and embark on an eight-day round trip through more than 900,000 miles of outer space. The Space Shuttle would be required merely to travel into low Earth orbit, circle the planet for up to a week before returning home.
No one had ever built a vehicle that could travel into orbit, then not only return to Earth entirely intact but prove so robust it could be refueled and refueled to repeat the journey again and again. This would require a true spacefaring vessel, and in 1969 such a vehicle remained the stu of science, like orbiting space stations and bases on the moon.
Almost every element of the proposed new ship would have to survive the full range of extraordinary forces exerted on man and machine by space flight. The shuttle would be built by wind resistance and drag until it reached the point known as "Max Q," where the airframe risks being torn to pieces by the forces of maximum aerodynamic stress. On reentry, the craft would heat from cold soak to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit and reach a velocity of up to twenty-ve times the speed of sound before slowing to a few hundred miles an hour to land on its own undercarriage under the control of its pilots.
