Review: A gentle book about a violent tragedy
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 7, 2014
With all the pages written about the Challenger disaster, which at this point might well outweigh the shuttle itself, it's hard to find much to add. This small and pleasantly-written book has the distinction of being the only deep insider non-technical account. The author, NASA's news announcer at the launch site, was an eyewitness and was intimately familiar with all the people and equipment involved. On the other hand, he had no engineering or management responsibilities, and he has no axe to grind.The account will be familiar to anyone who read the news stories at the time, or any thorough treatment since. I do not recommend it for people who have done neither of those things, it is not precise or technical enough to be a good introduction to the events. There are several excellent books on the Challenger disaster, and the Wikipedia article, supplemented by a few of the references, is pretty good.As a second or third book on a Challenger reading list, this account adds a lot of human information. It won't tell you much about why the shuttle blew up, but it might help you understand better how it felt to work for NASA that day, and during the aftermath. Not only NASA employees are covered, but also reporters, astronaut family members and military and political higer-ups who became involved. This is a book about people, not about rockets or the management of high-risk engineering projects or space exploration.The prose is clear and entertaining, although too even and gentle to be exciting, even given the dramatic story. There are some amusing and telling anecdotes which to my knowledge have not been previously published.There is one point on which people who like to argue about the disaster could have hoped for clarification, why the people at the launch site pursued a public relations strategy during the first 18 hours that seemed designed to create conspiracy theories I gave no credence to these theories at the time, and in any event I feel that they have been thoroughly refuted since. But the blame for them rests with some hard-to-explain decisions: locking all the doors, seizing all materials (not insisting on keeping originals of all materials, which makes sense, but prohibiting copies) and maintaining radio silence in Florida until essentially the entire story had leaked out elsewhere.The author notes these misjudgments, but implies they were personal idiosyncrasies of a few individuals, or in one case, a misunderstanding. You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to find that unsatisfying. Maybe it’s true, but it would take a harder-edged investigation to convince me. This author’s style suggests he would prefer a pleasant fiction to a messy fact.Hardcore space junkies will find some useful material here. People who worked for NASA at the time, and their friends and family, will appreciate it; as well perhaps as other people involved in space exploration or people considering it as a career. But I can’t recommend it for general readers. Short and pleasant as it is, there’s not enough meat for a book.