Orbital horror story

I vividly remember when Space Shuttle Columbia broke up as it reentered Earth's atmosphere on February 1st, 2003. I was headed to a work day at the summer camp where I spent my summers and heard NPR report that the shuttle was overdue for its landing. I felt a creeping sense of dread as updates began trickling in as people across the southwest began reporting streaks of light, contrails, and debris in the skies. It was quickly clear that astronauts Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon had all perished.

The destruction of Columbia was made all the more tragic when we learned that the crew was likely doomed long before they reentered orbit: a piece of foam had come free during liftoff and smashed a hole in the protective tiles covering shuttle's left wing. Mission Control spotted the problem during launch, but determined that it wasn't something to worry about: foam breaking off from the shuttle's external fuel tank wasn't an uncommon occurrence. Their error was etched in the skies over Texas two weeks later.

The accident brought with it painful memories of the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, which occurred nearly 17 years to the day on January 28th, 1986. In his latest book, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster at the Edge of Space, journalist Adam Higginbotham digs into the accident to explain how decisions embedded throughout the shuttle program during its inception and mismanagement along the way likely made such accidents inevitable.

Higginbotham seems poised to be the go-to person for explaining the complicated and layered stories behind some of the world's biggest historic disasters and the culpability of human decision making that led to them. His 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster was a breathtaking examination of the meltdown of the Soviet nuclear power plant in 1986. In it, he dissected the design, management, and actions that led up to the accident, and the desperate efforts that helped contain it.

With Challengers, he follows a similar path, going back to NASA's first disaster in January 1967 when the crew members of Apollo 1 burned alive when a fire broke out in the cockpit during a hardware test and working his way up the timeline to explore how and why the space agency decided to shift away from lunar missions to instead design and deploy the shuttle – a radical advance in space travel.

Growing up, the space shuttle was a marvel to watch: a space plane that delivered astronauts to Low Earth Orbit for experiments or resupply trips to Mir and later the International Space Station. It captured the imagination of the public and the showed that space travel wasn't just something out of science fiction, but something that was maybe attainable to, if not regular folks, a wide pool of specialists.

That was the original dream of the space shuttle: a way to bring the costs of space travel down to the point where it would be economically feasible for companies to deploy satellites, scientists and institutions to conduct experiments, or for technicians to visit satellites for repairs or replacements. Higginbotham traces the complicated route that advocates and NASA took to turn the shuttle from a concept to reality, utilizing experimental designs and engineering, economic trickery and forecasting, playing up expectations of its capabilities while playing down the risks that came with flying such a craft.

Prior to the shuttle, NASA and its counterparts reached orbit the old fashion way: rockets. The first Mercury astronauts sat atop missiles designed to deliver nuclear payloads to targets across the world, before NASA deployed the massive Saturn V rockets to deliver astronauts into orbit and to the Moon. It was reliable but expensive; you needed a new vehicle for each mission.

As the space race wound down after the success of Apollo 11, expensive was a bad thing for NASA. Faced with mounting costs of the Vietnam War and various social programs, policymakers weren't willing to continue to fund NASA's work at the levels at the height of the space race. Consequently, to keep flying into space, NASA turned to the concept of the space shuttle as a means to cut costs.

On paper, the shuttle was a brilliant daring concept: a reusable ship that could fly to space and back over and over again. Flown enough times, the US would save money in the long run while maintaining its presence in space.

This was something that had never been tried before. The massive white and black orbiter required considerable design and engineering work to be made to work – in addition to the ship itself, it required a massive fuel tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters that would lift the spacecraft into orbit and shed as they were used up. The orbiter and boosters would be recovered, refitted, and reused for the next mission. Planners estimated that NASA could fly a fleet of shuttles as much as 60 times a year.

Reality is more complicated than the plans put down on paper. The shuttle was one of the most complicated machines ever developed, and as astronaut John Glenn once famously said: "As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of rocket was supplied by lowest bidder" – a thought that ran through many astronaut's minds as they waited for liftoff.

It's often said that hindsight is 20/20, and there's an impulse to make a bee-line to examine the O-Rings that were ultimately responsible for the destruction of the Challenger.

Higginbotham does that, but goes beyond the story of the hardware. He covers the shuttle's development process in exacting detail, looking at the enormity of this problem and how complications slowed progress on the construction and design process.

The shuttle's protective tiles were one such challenge: to protect the aluminum airframe, engineers had to develop a novel material that was not only lightweight, but which could withstand the intense heat of reentry and stay on the shuttle at the same time. The initial tests saw them flaking off the vehicle in droves. Engineers found that they couldn't just glue them to the surface, because the shuttle's frame shifted as it moved, and any gaps would undermine the protection they afforded the craft. They ended up having to cover the shuttle in a fireproof fabric and affix the tiles to that.

Another challenge were the solid rocket boosters. Attached to the external fuel tank, they would run until exhausted once ignited. Derived from similar rockets used by the military, they could be adjusted to help steer the craft as it leapt into orbit, and as Higginbotham explains, engineers made a number of assumptions during the design process and didn't fully test their limits – particularly when it came to operating temperatures.

That was the case with the O-Rings, which were designed to seal the segments of the solid rocket boosters together after they were assembled in Florida (the SRBs were nearly 150 feet tall, and were shipped by train in segments). Made of rubber, the rings were nearly 40 feet in diameter and designed to prevent gases from escaping: their elasticity would fully seal the boosters once ignited. But Thiokol , the manufacturer that made the boosters, didn't fully test the limits of the elasticity or how they would function in colder temperatures. Ultimately, their assumptions led to not only near-disastrous incidents prior to Challenger, but eventually to the accident in January 1986.

What struck me about Higginbotham's book was at how early engineers were raising the alarm about these flaws, and how NASA's managers brushed those concerns off to the side. The STS-51-C mission, the third flight of Space Shuttle Discovery (launching almost exactly a year prior to Challenger on January 27th, 1985) very nearly realized those concerns. The shuttle launched during a cold spell and the O-Rings didn't do their jobs well: when the boosters were recovered, engineers found that superheated gasses escaped and burned the first set of O-Rings before eating into the secondaries. Higginbotham explains that the shuttle likely came within milliseconds of exploding during its ascent.

It should have been a warning to NASA. While engineers raised concerns, the managers at Thiokol and the space agency didn't heed them. It's not hard to understand why: NASA was under considerable pressure to heed to a crowded launch schedule.

At the same time, interest in space travel was waning. To drum up interest, NASA initiated a program to send a school teacher into space and demonstrate that the shuttle could be used to open up access to space to a wider population. After a lengthy selection process, the agency selected New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe, and assigned her to the STS-51-L Challenger mission. In the leadup to the mission, McAuliffe became a huge celebrity throughout the world, and interest in NASA and its work skyrocketed.

In the leadup to the launch of Challenger in 1986 was heavily delayed due to mechanical and weather issues, and in the spotlight, NASA was keen to get it off the ground. Further delays threatened the timing of the schedule of launches that were to take place later that year.

Despite the fact that temperatures were lower than Discovery's launch the year before, and even after engineers raised concerns about the safety of the launch, NASA pressed ahead. Thiokol's engineers were staunchly opposed to launching the shuttle, but were ultimately overruled by company managers uneager to disappoint their biggest customer. The rest, as they say, is history. The nation was horrified as it watched live as the the shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight.

As in Midnight in Chernobyl, Higginbotham explores how these types of tragedies aren't one-off incidents. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant wasn't just a mechanical failure and design flaw, and the Challenger Space Shuttle wasn't just an O-Ring that failed. Both are the results of a complicated and years-long system of mismanagement and flawed and dishonest decision making, which laid the groundwork for the worse case scenario to occur. Neither Challenger or Chernobyl would have never exploded had any number of people along the way taken the time to think through issues, listen to the people raising concerns, or put safety front and center.

The results are tragedies that we can learn from, recognizing that the complexities of the systems and organizations we build can lead us to great things – or horrific, regrettable failures that will haunt us for years to come.

Reading this book in the last couple of weeks has been a bit surreal as NASA tried to figure out what to do with the Boeing Crew Flight Test (Boe-CFT) that launched in June 2024 and brought astronauts Barry E. Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station. The mission was plagued with delays because of mechanical issues with the capsule, and upon reaching space, the crew detected helium leaks and experienced problems with some of the aft reaction control system thrusters.

The crew were only supposed to stay at the station for eight days, but because of the issues, they'll remain in orbit onboard the ISS until February 25th. NASA decided to avoid the risk of the capsule failing on reentry and brought it back autonomously on September 6th. It experienced two problems on its way down – a thruster failed to start and there was a glitch in its navigational system.

While this particular mission turned out okay, I couldn't help but think about how similar this mission felt to the likes of the disastrous Challenger and Columbia missions: Boeing has already been under fire for its hardware: first after a pair of deadly crashes with its 737 Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019, while a door blew out on another plane in January 2024, raising questions about how the aerospace company is prioritizing safety and quality over its revenue.

After NASA phased out its fleet of space shuttles in 2011, it's been working to find ways to get its astronauts to space in a cost-effective manner. While it's begun to rely heavily on SpaceX as a third-party contractor to deliver personnel and hardware to orbit, it's also needed its own hardware for missions into Low Earth Orbit and eventually, to reach the Moon for the ongoing Artemis program.

The same pressures that NASA faced in 1967 with the Apollo program and in the 1980s with the shuttle program are still present today: complicated organizations and programs with lots of moving parts and decisions that need to be made, all with mounting public and political pressure to be on time, error-free, and under budget.

Space travel is hard; we'll never be able to fully eliminate the risk of traveling to space. But while NASA has worked to overhaul its culture and management, problems like the Crew Flight Test feel as though they're a product of the same factors that led to the demise of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. NASA's prudence with the recent test flight is encouraging: a hopeful sign that they've learned from their mistakes. I hope that's the case.