Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

Journalist and former U.S. correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl) offers an expansive retrospective view of the 1986 Challenger disaster. Shortly after beginning its launch on January 28, the space shuttle orbiter disintegrated into pieces, killing all seven crew members aboard. In the aftermath, fingers were pointed at various groups within NASA and its contractors in an attempt to discover fault and assign blame. Jacques Roy’s smooth narration carries listeners through a highly detailed exploration of the history of the space program to contextualize how small flaws—both mechanical and human—accumulated along the path to seemingly inevitable tragedy in the quest to make manned space flight an everyday reality. While Roy holds to a resonant evenness that some listeners may find monotonous during the more technical sections, this is balanced by the subtle use of accents and varied tones for the paraphrased conversations that reflect the range of experience and background among the people who designed, built, directed, and manned the Challenger and its sibling orbiters.