Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age [Hardcover]

Richard C. Cook (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2007

The Reagan Administration pushed hard for NASA to launch shuttle mission 51L, before it was ready. 73 seconds into the launch, the shuttle exploded, killing seven people and leaving a nation traumatized. Richard Cook, the lead resource analyst at NASA for the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), was the first to warn of possible catastrophic failure. His memo, which detailed astronaut concerns and warnings from the shuttle builders at Morton Thiokol, were ignored by top NASA officials and members of the Reagan administration. In the aftermath of the explosion, NASA launched an investigation to "discover" the cause of the disaster. Though within NASA there was absolute certainty about the O-ring joint failure, they began a cover-up by publicly proclaiming that the cause of the explosion was unknown. A Reagan administration Commission perpetrated the same lie. And when Richard Cook realized that the Commission was not interested in revealing the truth, he acted as a true patriot and hero and leaked the original O-ring warning documents to the New York Times. His article set off a cascade of disclosures about the events leading up to the disaster, including revelations by Morton Thiokol engineers that they had tried to stop the launch.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A gripping true-life thriller that describes the struggle to discover and disseminate the truth about the 1986 destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, this book provides new and startling material, presented in a spellbinding narrative with direct relevance to the current state of the US government. Former NASA resource analyst Cook, whose long public service record includes 20 years at the Treasury Department, rocketed from anonymous bureaucrat to public fame during the Challenger investigation, and later was awarded the Cavallo Foundation's Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government, for his efforts to uncover the facts about the faulty O-ring seals that led the shuttle's solid rocket boosters to explode. Easily the most informative and important book on the disaster, Cook's work is meticulously documented, augmenting his own insider knowledge with transcripts, memoranda, reports and interviews to provide the first truly comprehensive book on what happened on January 28, 1986, and why. Tracing the history of the space shuttle's design and development, Cook leads readers step-by-step, decision-by-decision to the tragic event. Rather than an accident, Cook concludes that the disaster was the result of Reagan's autocratic management style and closed-door decision-making process. Further documentation shows how the Rogers Commission, charged with investigating the explosion, was conceived as part of a cover-up effort, which also included collusion by some NASA managers, White House operatives and commission head William Rogers. By focusing solely on equipment malfunctions and internal NASA decision-making, it seems that Rogers evaded the most important question: why was it so important to those in power to launch the shuttle on that day? This account, featuring many players still working in government today, is essential reading on the topics of NASA and US government obfuscation.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In the days following the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986, Cook, then a budget analyst at NASA, leaked documents to theNew York Times. The papers acquired significance for predicting that faulty rubber seals on the solid fuel rockets could trigger a catastrophe, as the official investigation indeed concluded. In this memoir and personal investigation, Cook justifies his leak, or, from another perspective, his violation of trust, and proposes a theory for why NASA managers launched after overruling objections from the rocket engineers. It is this: President Ronald Reagan wanted Challenger in orbit with teacher Christine McAuliffe so that he could speak with her live during his State of the Union speech. Cook amasses technical evidence about violations of launch criteria, telephone calls between NASA and the White House, and hearsay from an astrologer who, Cook reports, said he was told personally by Reagan that he decided to launch. Whether Cook is holding a blank or a smoking gun, his book is sure to provoke controversy. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (February 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560259809
• ISBN-13: 978-1560259800
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,205,206 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Important Spaceflight Book in 20 Years, March 27, 2007

By 

Terry Sunday (El Paso, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age (Hardcover)

In the history of American manned spaceflight, it seems that major catastrophes occur about once every 15 to 20 years. The first happened on January 27, 1967, when an electrical fire broke out inside the Apollo 1 spacecraft during a ground test on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy. Fed by the high-pressure pure oxygen cabin atmosphere that caused flammable items such as Velcro to burn with incendiary intensity, the fire claimed the lives of astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. The latest disaster was, of course, the loss of space shuttle orbiter Columbia and its seven-astronaut crew on February 1, 2003. Columbia broke up during re-entry because superheated plasma entered a hole in the leading edge of the left wing--a hole that had been punched by a piece of insulation foam that had come off of the external tank during launch.

In between these two disasters was another one--the explosion of space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, just 73 seconds after lifting off with a seven-person crew that included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, the first "citizen in space." In the intervening 20 years, there have been many excellent books written about Challenger. If you read any of them, you'll gain a good "nuts-and-bolts" understanding of why Challenger exploded. There is no disagreement on the technical facts: the rubber O-rings in a field joint on the right-hand Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) failed to seal because unusually low overnight temperatures at the Cape had chilled them so much that they lost their resiliency. Hot gas from inside the motor leaked out through the joint and eventually eroded a hole in the side of the SRB case, dooming Challenger and her crew.

There is, however, a lot of disagreement over another aspect of what happened to Challenger, and it is this area that author Richard C. Cook covers so well in his compelling, highly readable, first-hand account "Challenger Revealed." The question that has remained unanswered until now is: WHY did NASA decide to launch Challenger despite an overwhelming number of reasons not to do so? What pressures did NASA face, and from whom, to ignore or violate virtually all of its tried-and-true safety procedures just to get Challenger into orbit? What could possibly have been so urgent for NASA to put at great risk, and indeed sacrifice, seven brave astronauts and a multi-billion-dollar space shuttle?

Mr. Cook is the NASA "whistleblower" who first revealed to the public the fact that both NASA and Morton Thiokol, Inc. (the SRB contractor) had serious flight safety concerns with the SRB O-rings long before Challenger's final flight. As such, he is uniquely qualified to explore this question, and he does so exhaustively and in great detail in "Challenger Revealed." He draws on his personal experiences at NASA, and on memoranda, documents, vu-graph presentations and interview transcripts newly available from the National Archives, to venture considerably beyond the best previous study, Diane Vaughan's scholarly 1996 work "The Challenger Launch Decision." He shows that the Rogers Commission, appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan to investigate the Challenger disaster, was profoundly political and exceptionally "cozy" with NASA, the subject of its investigation. It worked to an agenda largely intended to shield senior NASA management from any accountability. The process that led Mr. Cook to identify the ultimate source of the "launch at any cost" pressure is logical and convincing (if, unfortunately, lacking a real "smoking gun").

"Challenger Revealed" is a masterful study of how far a bureaucracy will go to protect itself, and of the pitfalls that inevitably arise when politics becomes an overriding consideration in making important technical decisions. It should be required reading for every "space buff" and, even more so, for every citizen concerned about the process of decisionmaking in government.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Challenger crew might have survived ..., March 15, 2007

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LG (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age (Hardcover)

NASA was a proud organization made up of some the best scientists and engineers in the world but it is clear that NASA has some the worse managers in relation to the development and flight history of the space shuttle.

As Mr. Cook's book states, NASA sacrificed everything to develop a space flight system that could meet the military's need for a `heavy lift space vehicle' which meant they created a spaceship that did not have a first-stage abort system that doomed the Challenger crew (a generation ago).

Mr. Cook's book correctly states...For the first time in NASA's history, they neglected the lives of their astronauts by creating a space flight system that did not give a crew the chance to escape during the launch phase of a flight because creating a launch phase abort system was too expensive and would reduce the lift capability of the shuttle and thereby making it useless to the US military. In addition to this, NASA knew the shuttle's SRB's were not performing as expected but they continued to fly the shuttle because they wanted to show the world that NASA could meet any demands civilian, scientific, or military at the expense of human life and good engineering judgment.

If NASA had developed a first stage abort option into the shuttle it would not have met the military's needs (lift-capabilities) so an escape structure was not designed into the shuttle system to save money and increase the shuttle's military options.

Mr. Cook's book correctly states that NASA wanted to meet the needs of the defense department at the expense of safely and common sense. The Challenger crew might have survived if a first stage abort option was part of the shuttle's design.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hero of Challenger Investigation Provides First Person Account of Tragedy, April 1, 2007

By 

Kathleen Connell "Kathleen Connell" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age (Hardcover)

Anyone in government or commercial space who dares to send humans into space, needs to set aside time to read Challenger Revealed, a new book by Richard C. Cook.
Cook knowingly gave up his promising NASA career and his preferred everyman status, in order to tell the truth as a key witness in the Challenger investigation.
Reviled by some at NASA for speaking out, Richard continued his public service career at Treasury and devoted years of personal time to meticulously research and write this important testament from the Challenger disaster.
This is a gut wrenching, extremely well written narrative, which reads like a non-fiction techno mystery, with a great deal of personal revelations from Cook himself. Cook's conclusions and research reach into the heart of darkness surrounding the loss of Challenger- how much did political influence impact the launch?
The murky relationship between political agendas and space policy is a subject that benefits from Cook's research, even if the conclusion he reaches is as surprising as it will be controversial. Cook's discovery of missing evidence in the national archive system was a jolt for this reader and raises more questions about the entire affair.

The lessons that Cook has to teach apply not just to Gov space, but to crewed commercial space tourism, and complex enterprises that involve human life.
This political analysis is also an important addition to the thinking about the causations of disasters in large organizations, and compliments the work done with respect to "normalization of deviance" by others in works on the subject of Challenger. It is another piece in a puzzle about an event that traumatized a nation, and we as a nation must once against thank Richard Cook for uttering possibilities that few are willing to openly discuss.

More evidence will be helpful in order to assess and understand the causes of Challenger. After reading this book, one is left feeling that more witnesses may come forth, other pieces of the puzzle will emerge, and the Challenger disaster story will continue to unfold. As painful or uncomfortable as this search for the facts may be, it is imperative to get at the truths of Challenger in order save human life aloft in the future.