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

By Richard C. Cook

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560259809
• ISBN13: 9781560259800
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 2.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

If Only Most Workers Had This Kind of Principle

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.

Challenger Revealed: One of the best books I've read in a long while!

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.

Hero of Challenger Investigation Provides First Person Account of Tragedy

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.

The Most Important Spaceflight Book in 20 Years

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 previ

The Challenger crew might have survived ...

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.