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

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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.

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.

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.

Challenger Revealed by Richard C Cook is a long overdue account of what went wrong at NASA and what influenced Reagan's decision to launch, against even his (better) judgement and recommendations of his advisors.

It is both gripping and highly informative in its description of the events leading up to and throughout that fateful day.

In my reading, this quickly became the type of book that I couldn't put down, as I found myself carrying it with me throughout the house so I could read more while I tended to my normal daily routine.

The author shows just how bureaucratic NASA has become and how the military gradually began inflicting its influence more and more, despite the original code of ethtics at NASA, emphasizing peaceful purposes.

In the course of reading this book, Mr. Cook, has quickly become one of my favorite authors to the point where I anxiously await all his writing contributions, and the release of his newest book.

I wish I could source it, but a few years ago I saw some reporting (from the BBC or one of the UK papers, I want to say) that examined claims the Reagan administration pushed for the go ahead launch because they planned to link Reagan live to the Challenger crew during the State of the Union that night. It seemed plausible. Certainly it was Reagan that brought the modern image machine to the White House. He would have loved that idea. Perhaps Cook examines this.

For a non-engineer, Mr. Cooke did excellent work as a budget analyst at NASA - a little too smart and conscientious for his bureaucratic britches, as most whistle-blowers are. Cooke relates his experience well as one who came to NASA dazzled by the glory of the space race heyday, only to realize it is was far from the top-notch, professional organization portrayed after the Apollo I pad fire. Plenty of employees saw the entire Shuttle program as a disaster waiting to happen, and too little was done too late to likely avert one.

Many in Washington headquarters, far detached from the launch operations and reality (save for the #2 guy who had launch authority, who was also arguably detached) saw their jobs as just that - a job, nothing special, not a privilege, nothing that someone's life down the line was worth a definitive stand. The lack of emotion at headquarters displayed in the immediate wake of the tragedy, as Cook reveals, is stunning.

Besides a detailed play-by-play of countdown decisions across the country between Morton Thiokol and NASA centers, and a non-overwhelming explanation of the O-rings and booster interlock, Cook adds much historical background explaining the Shuttle's reason for existence with NASA becoming an arm of DoD. The role of the Teacher in Space program gets plenty of scrutiny, as does the investigative facade led by Reagan's lawyer-buddy Don Regan While Cooke doesn't and cannot definitively deliver the one "smoking gun" who pushed the launch button that January morning, his final chapter on Reagan and a media supposedly flustered with the launch delays is intriguing. Whatever weight one gives his final source, Cooke shows in any case that a lot of morally inexcusable factors came into play together.

Unfortunately, the "culture" other Challenger authors have written about operates today much as it did in 1981. Challenger Revealed is a must read for those who have big dreams of making a difference in the continuing manned space program, whether as a scientist, engineer, or heaven forbid, an astronaut.

Since the Russians put the first man in space there have been politics involved to some extent in space missions. It is possible that political factors contributed to the rush to launch Challenger over the stated objections of solid rocket booster engineers at the Morton Thiokiol Utah contractor the day before. Cook makes clear the factors that may have influenced NASA administrators to insist on a launch. Cook mentions that in the Rogers Commission hearings it came out that the Challenger launch turned NASA policy on its head. Instead of engineers proving the launch was safe to go, they had to prove with certainty it was NOT safe to go. Cook was a very sharp witted budget analyst with a thorough understanding of problems with the shuttle, and the well known in NASA information on the defects of the solid rocket booster. He presents a captivating well documented account of the Challenger disaster, from his position inside the agency.

The Reagan administration bears responsibility for the Challenger disaster because the two leaders of NASA leading up to the disaster, Beggs and Graham, were Reagan political appointees. If you believe those at the top deserve credit for success and for failure, then the buck has to stop on the desk of the NASA chief executive. James Beggs, NASA Chief and Reagan appointee, resigned due to a scandal relating to contract fraud from before his NASA job. William Robert Graham, a Reagan politically appointed Deputy NASA administrator, succeeded Beggs as Acting NASA administrator in December, 1985. Graham was the top man at NASA when the shuttle Challenger was launched in the cold early morning of January 28, 1986, the same day scheduled for Ronald Reagan's SOTU speech. The Reagan administrations had grand plans to use the shuttle as a 'space truck' to launch all military payloads on a rigorous schedule. Cook wonders if this acted to create pressure to not delay the launch? Cook doesn't answer but presents the facts. The investigation afterward uncovered a written submission from Graham and NASA suggesting wording that might be used by the President in his SOTU speech that very night, hailing NASA for its accomplishments and highlighting Krista McAuliffe, the first 'citizen' and teacher in space. Did this also create pressure to push for the launch, especially in the cold early morning? The shuttle exploded minutes after liftoff at about 45,000 feet, and the SOTU was delayed. The nation was in shock. Later, after the official Rogers investigation, Senator Fritz Hollings requested a copy of the first SOTU speech for his Senate investigation, Cook relates Hollings said that the last page of the SOTU was missing. The end of the SOTU is often where a President highlights an American hero. Did Reagan want to do that for Krista McAuliffe? The Rogers Commission determined that the disaster occurred due to the solid rocket booster O-rings being too cold and not resilient enough to seal a critical joint in the SRB. The temperatures and O-ring resiliency were known problems. The Rogers Commission did not determine why the launch was done that day, or why it was not even delayed until the afternoon when the temperatures were much warmer.

NASA Chief Graham left NASA later in 1986. Graham went on to a prestigious political appointee position as science advisor in the Reagan White House.

It is remarkable to me how few Americans are aware that our nation's most respected institutions have been compromised from their respective missions for serving the public. Richard C. Cook has done a wonderful job of not only presenting an accurate and very detailed accounting to the audience about one of America's most preventable tragedies, but also provides an understanding of how professional institutions have failed to police the intrusion of unwarranted hidden agendas by powerful political forces. This should be required reading for all college level introductory American History and Political Science courses. This author's presentation is a testament to the critical value of pluralism in our democratic republic.

It is unfortunate that so few younger American's are even aware of the Space Shuttle Challenger's horrific disaster, much less the circumstances leading to its' demise and the cast of characters both in the spotlight and behind the scenes. This book is an authoritative accounting of this historic episode, by an author who actually lived through the story and experienced the tragedy directly from the inside as one of NASA's professional staff. His narrative is an example of how all patriotic Americans can stand up and tell the truth so that we all can see the reality of what is really happening and respond appropriately to it.

NASA and the engineering community as a whole, both practicing professionals and academic, must recognize that that they have an extensive challenge in establishing appropriate safeguards against the strong-arm political tactics that have intruded into the administrative affairs of America's institutions and the subsequent cover-up of those adverse forces when they don't want to be publicly exposed for their responsibility. It is evident that this book's publication in 2006 was not in time to avert a repeat of the same circumstances of the Challenger disaster from befalling the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, but Richard Cook has provided a blueprint for others in comparable situations to follow.

Just as the brave heroes like Richard Feynman revealed the truth about the Shuttle Challenger's demise, others have taken up the cause to reveal and where possible amend the corruption of powerful political forces. For example, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) spent seven years of the American taxpayers resources in order to issue a fallacious report regarding the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th 2001, they were effectively thwarted from covering up the truth. A group of citizens banded together, backed by over 500 architect and engineering professionals (AE911Truth), had forced NIST to accept and disclose the fact that WTC Building 7 did in fact collapse at free-fall acceleration. This simple fact about a building's free-fall dynamics had been actively suppressed by NIST with fabricated lies for seven years, since this reality was direct evidence of controlled demolition. NIST was forced to recant their prevarications and publish the truth in their final report due to the dedication of committed American citizens making a difference. These citizens are an example of what Richard C. Cook's historical work can motivate in all of us. Let's hope all of America's institutions will learn that they need this kind of commitment woven into their organizational fabric. The integrity of pluralism in our society has been long been compromised and we need this kind of renewed commitment to re-establish its' place as a foundation for a healthy citizenry. Richard C. Cook's "Challenger Revealed" gives America a starting point.

This book is the best, most thorough, most readable treatment of the Challenger Disaste-- what led up to it, and what happened in its aftermath. It deals with the technical, bureaucratic, political, and personal angles of the story. There was much more coverup than is commonly known. It is a true story that all Americans should know.

This is one book that will hold your interest- until you get about halfway through, then it seriously bogs down. There are enough errors of fact in the book to make you question the other information. For instance, Mr. Cook states that he was seriously affected by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the proceeds to get the date wrong. He also speaks of how a shuttle explosion on the pad would equal "kilotons" of force, and then gives a different number in pounds of TNT. There is a serious amount of repetition in the book- so much in fact that you sometimes think that you may have lost your place and are reading the same passages again.

After several chapters, it begins to appear as if Mr. Cook is trying to beat this subject to death. He could have made his point and killed many fewer trees.

I also have a problem with the publisher- Thunder's mouth Press, who have a reputation for printing the work of crackpots- like Mark Lane.