Customer Reviews

No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well written. Jensen does a nice job of avoiding sappy emotionalism and technical speak. Excellent job of showing how the Challenger explosion was less a technical failure and more of a management failure. Vividly describes how the how the culture at NASA had devolved from the heights of Apollo into the bloated, compartmentalized bureaucracy that exisited in 1985. In the chapter about the tele-conference on the night before launch you can really sense the fear in the engineers as it dawns on them that NASA is going to launch anyway. Finally, Jensen's look at Richard Fennyman and the Rogers Commission is brilliant...brought back the stunning moment when I saw the o-ring in the ice water. This is the best book on the Challenger explosion.

I read this book because it seemed to be the only book in print that most closely approximated the one for which I was looking: a straight-forward history of the Challenger disaster. (Another, similar leading book about the disaster seemed to reduce the subject to a risk management study, or so I surmised from its descriptions and reviews, which is not at all what I wanted!) While the sections of this book that are actually about the shuttle disaster are riveting, they only make up about one-half the book, the remainder being a history of rocketry and space exploration up to the time of the shuttle. I could have done without this extra information, not that it was dull, but it was superfluous in the context of a book that seemed on the surface to be primarily about the Challenger disaster. I think an editor should have advised the author to squeeze the first half of the book into a single chapter or introduction, and then to go directly into the shuttle disaster. Also, because the book was originally written in a non-English language and then translated into English, there seem to be some odd or awkward phrases throughout the work. The translator's most peculiar habit is to switch from past to present tense, which I found distracting, along with the author's tendency to use incomplete sentences, which, while I understand was a stylistic choice on his part, forces careful readers to stop and re-read sentences in order to make sure they didn't miss something. It's a book worth reading, but I don't think the definitive book on this subject has yet to be written, especially since the author did not rely on any of his own interviews with persons close to the subject (such as NASA personnel and astronauts' families).

One of the first books of the Challenger disaster, this is a good general discussion of that event as well as a decent analysis of NASA's perceived "downfall" from the heights of the Apollo program to the stressed, over-ranging attempts at cheap, monthly launches of the Shuttle. Jensen gives a balanced account of the Launch decision making (although, I agree with the previous reviewer that he could have provided much more technical detail) and subsequent investigation(s) and does a fair job at blaming the right people without seeming to point the finger. Overall, a good starting point for details of the accident, it'll probably make you pursue other accounts (like D. Vaughn's "Challenger Launch Decision").

An extremely readable account of the Challenger disaster and the NASA culture that led up to it. It does an excellent job in explaining to the general reader what went wrong, and why; but NASA buffs (like myself) have seen most of this stuff before and may find it a bit thin on the excruciating detail we crave. Overall, though, it is very accessable and even quite moving in some passages. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Challenger and an overview of the NASA culture up through the mid-80's.

Having checked this book out several years ago from the local library, I couldn't wait to get my own copy, and I'm enjoying it just as much the second time around. Very well written and suspenseful, even though I know the 'end' of the story.

There are many, many sub-stories behind the Challenger disaster. This book does a great job of piecing all of them together into one coherent time line.