- Speaker #0
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, the show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelsang.
- Speaker #1
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show. on radio and podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by Qualia Sinalytic at qualialife.com. The Not All Better Show today will delve into the fascinating world of science and discovery, bringing you a story that I think is going to ignite your own curiosity, just as it did with me, and inspire some action on your part. I'm your host, Paul Vogelsang, and we have an extraordinary episode lined up for you, part of our Science Literacy Author Interview Series. Our guest is author Adam Higginbotham, an acclaimed author. whose meticulous research and powerful storytelling have shed new light on some of the most dramatic and impactful events in modern history. You may know him from his award-winning book, Midnight in Chernobyl Today. Adam Higginbotham joins us to discuss his latest work, Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. Imagine a crisp, cold morning in Florida, January 28, 1986. The nation is glued to their televisions, brimming with pride. and excitement as the space shuttle Challenger prepares for liftoff. Among the crew are seven brave souls, including Krista McAuliffe, a schoolteacher poised to become the first civilian in space. But just 73 seconds after launch, the unthinkable happens. An explosion shatters the dream and the world watches in horror as the shuttle disintegrates, taking all seven crew members with it. In his book, Adam Higginbotham goes beyond the catastrophic malfunction of O-rings. He explores the deeply entrenched culture within NASA, a culture of risk-taking and image-conscious decisions that, despite the agency's incredible achievements, was ripe for disaster. From the tragic Apollo 1 fire that claimed the lives of three astronauts in 1967 to the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, Adam Higginbotham paints a vivid picture of how repeated warnings were ignored, how hubris overshadowed. caution and how the relentless pursuit of progress sometimes came at an unimaginable cost. Today's interview will take us through the harrowing history and complex dynamics of NASA's shuttle program. We'll learn about the lives of the Challenger crew members before their fateful flight, the technical and managerial challenges faced by NASA, and the broader implications of these tragic events on the future of space exploration. But this isn't just a story of failure. It is absolutely a call to action, a reminder that the pursuit of scientific discovery must be balanced with an unwavering commitment to safety and integrity. As we look to the future of space travel, the lessons from Challenger are more relevant than ever. Adam Higginbotham's account challenges us to reflect on our own approach to risk, to question. the decisions made in the name of progress and to ensure that the sacrifices made by those brave astronauts were not in vain. So stay with us as we dive deep into this compelling narrative of heroism, disaster, and the relentless human spirit. This is the Not All Better Show on radio and podcast. You won't want to miss what's coming up next. Adam Higginbotham, welcome to the program.
- Speaker #2
Thank you for having me.
- Speaker #1
I am excited to talk to you about this book. Of course, we're going to discuss your new book, Challenger. a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. The book has been getting rave reviews. I've enjoyed it. I know our audience is really going to be captivated by this. It's a part of all of our history, but certainly our audiences probably has some pretty vivid recall of this moment, as many do. It's one of those times we all kind of knew where we were with Challenger, and you talk about that. So I'd like to just jump in and ask you kind of this big question. What drew you to this subject? Because a lot has been written. about Challenger, not in the way that you've done it, and we'll talk about that, but what drew you to this subject?
- Speaker #2
You're right. A lot has been written about it, but I was a little bit surprised to learn when I started doing the sort of background research that the last time anybody really tried to address the subject in this way as a piece of narrative nonfiction was in 1987, when two journalists who were around and reporting on the subject at the time both published books. But nobody's really attempted to do that in the 30 years since. And the reason that I was interested in it was because as a kid, I was fascinated with the space program. And I was of an age where the shuttle was really my part of the space program. The first shuttle was launched when I was 12, I think in April 1981. And I was 17 when this accident happened. I remember really clearly and exactly the way you described. The first book I wrote was about the Chernobyl accident. And I did not actually recall where I was when I heard the news about that at all. But Challenger, which happened almost exactly three months earlier, you know, I could remember exactly where I was and how I felt about it at the time. And it had the, you know, there are some commonalities between the reasons for the accident in Chernobyl and the Challenger accident. And so it had come up in conversations that I'd had when I'd been interviewed about the Chernobyl book. So it was already at the front of my mind when I came to sit down and try and think about what I'd like to write another book about. And when I did begin that research, I realized that the way that Challenger has been remembered for a lot of the last 30 years, it concentrates on the story of Krista McCullough, the teacher in space. I mean, for obvious reasons, she was a very charismatic individual, and she was made the centerpiece of that mission in January 86. But in the years since, I think that the other six members of the crew have been almost forgotten. So I wanted to write a book that told the stories of each of the seven members of the crew. and gave each of them kind of equal importance in the narrative and explored how they came to be on the launch pad that day, but also to explore the stories of the wider class of characters, including and especially the handful of rocket engineers who tried to stop the launch happening that morning. There was a lot that I wanted to bring to the story. And as it transpired, there was also a lot of new material and new voices that had emerged in the years since anybody had last tried to do that.
- Speaker #1
Will Barron Yeah, thank you for that. And you mentioned Midnight in Chernobyl. congratulations on that bestselling book. Again, congratulations on Challenger, your newest book. Thank you. Research is amazing. And of course, I want to talk a lot about that. And you mentioned Krista McAuliffe, another focus of much of the reporting. You did something a little differently, which I really enjoyed. You broke the book down in kind of three parts, and you went back into history a little bit and showed that the Krista McAuliffe element and the O-ring element were very much... predated by a lot of things that were going on within NASA's culture. Tell us a little bit about how that contributed to the disaster, because it did precede this and we might have stopped it, prevented it, had we known some of these things.
- Speaker #2
I think that a lot of the history that leads into and causes the disaster is there's a sort of cultural development within NASA over the years that they were launching manned missions into space. And certainly in the wake of the Moon Program. After the successful moon landing in 1969, NASA really came not only to be perceived out in the wider world as an organization that could achieve the almost impossible on a regular basis, but that began to be believed inside the agency too. And so that did not go away in the years after the moon landings came to an end in 72, but really intensified. And even their close calls and accidents only served in some ways to reinforce that idea. So, Apollo 13 was remembered almost immediately as not a potential disaster in which three men were almost marooned in space and left to their deaths a quarter of a million miles from Earth. But it was a successful failure, a triumph of ingenuity and daring do and heroism, which brought these three men back from the brink of disaster. And so it was kind of the way the public perceived it and the way it was perceived within NASA was not as, wow, we came really close to losing three astronauts here. And it was. What an amazing achievement to bring these people safely back to a miraculous splashdown. And several of the astronauts that I spoke to in researching the Challenger book said that we'd begun to think that we were infallible. We only realized this in retrospect. And so that really contributed to the sort of complacency and the hubris that ultimately led to the accident. Although certainly the astronauts and the engineers at NASA were aware of the fact that spaceflight is an incredibly risky endeavor. and what they were doing was very dangerous. But they'd returned triumphant from one after another of these missions. And so it had become possible to forget that death was pretty close at hand.
- Speaker #1
We're all paying close attention to Elon Musk and SpaceX and everything that's going on around kind of the privatization of some of this space travel. And SpaceX and Elon Musk make a big deal about the idea of risk. And you talk about, this notion of acceptable risk. That was also an element for NASA too, this hubris, along with this idea that we're going to space after all. We're launching a rocket hundreds of miles away from Earth. Yeah. I mean,
- Speaker #2
the idea of acceptable risk is central to the way NASA was run at the time, remains central to the way it's run now, and remains central to everything that Elon Musk does as well. It rests on the idea that this is a hazardous activity. You know, it's not like flying an airplane on a commercial airline flight, which unfortunately was how it came to be represented to the public by the time the Challenger launch took place. But because it is experimental flight, it means that everybody recognises that it's impossible to make it 100% safe. So you just have to do an engineering analysis of every component involved in the spacecraft and try and figure out what is a tolerable level of risk. The to carry men and women into the space on this incredibly complex machine. And only when everybody has agreed that the engineering tolerances of each component of the spacecraft meet an acceptable level, can you proceed. And that's really what's at the heart of acceptable risk. But the difference between the space flights that have been conducted now and the space flights that have been conducted 40 years ago is that Boeing and SpaceX both have written into their contracts now that the risk of a catastrophic failure in flight can be no greater than one in 270. Now, an engineering analysis was done on the chance of a catastrophic failure in the solid rockets in advance of the beginning of the first space shuttle program. And that found that the chance of two of those rockets failing in a single flight was around one in 27. So you can see that what's deemed acceptable risk now is a 10 times improvement on what it was back in 1978.
- Speaker #1
Hi, it's Paul. I mentioned our sponsor today is Qualia Sinalytic. If you want to age better, you have to try Qualia Sinalytic. Well, politics is absolutely front of mind. And since I live near Washington, D.C., I hear all sorts of comments directed at government officials. I'm a former U.S. government official. And the sentiments that, you know, so-and-so is so senile have echoed throughout our nation's history, really, not just today, but particularly during election years. Well, I, for one, believe. Neither seniors nor senators or any of us should have to feel senile. In fact, I've used qualia senolytic to promote my own mental and physical fitness, and it has just been a game changer. Here's how it works. As we age, everyone accumulates senescent cells in their body. These senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that. middle-age feeling. Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow the rest of the cells to thrive in the body. Personally, I found I had more energy. I felt years younger over the last few months, and I'm even more enthusiastic. I'm always enthusiastic, but this has really helped resist aging at the cellular level for better aging. Try Qualia Senolytic. Go to qualialife.com slash it. NOB for up to 50% off and use the code NOB at checkout for an additional 15% off. That's qualialife.com slash NOB. All of this will be in our show notes, but you get a 15% off of your purchase when you use NOB as a code. So Qualia Senolytic. If you want to age better, you have to try Qualia Senolytic. Thanks to Qualia for sponsoring today's show. Fascinating. Thank you. Adam Higginbotham is our guest. today written the wonderful new book, Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. The book is getting rave reviews, Adam, and I enjoyed one of the reviews saying that Higginbotham's comprehensive and effective recounting and explanation illuminates a tragedy that was entirely preventable. And I thought that was one that made sense to me, having read the book and kind of digested a lot of this, because a lot of this did precede some of the Challenger accident. itself. There was also this really toxic environment that you talk about in the book, and that played a role. Tell us a little bit about this culture and how that influenced some of the decisions that were being made and how it just persisted for years, even leading to some budget issues.
- Speaker #2
I think that the culture you're talking about is one in which individual engineers, middle-ranking engineers, lower-level engineers would come forward with warnings about elements of the system that they thought. were problematic and potentially dangerous. But those warnings either were disregarded or were not passed further up the reporting chain to the upper levels of the agency. And that was something that was found both in the lead up to the Apollo 1 fire, which took place in 1967, when three astronauts died in a fire on the pad. Cape Canaveral and the Challenger accident and the Columbia accident in 2003, which is why, you know, the book is actually structured around those three accidents. So it starts with the Apollo 1 fire and then Challenger takes up the main central part of the book and then it concludes with Columbia. And that's why I chose to do that is because there are ways in which NASA really experienced the same accident over and over and over again.
- Speaker #1
One of the things that I very much noticed was this in breaking down the book in this way that you did in Bree. sections. The final section really deals with a couple of things that I'd really never saw before either. I wonder if you'll talk about one, and that's the Rogers Commission, because that was really an eye-opening element that I found in the book and didn't know much about it at all. How did you come across that?
- Speaker #2
What I discovered was that the media in 1986 was better resourced than it had probably ever been before and better than it's been since. It was an absolute high watermark. As soon as the accident happened, hundreds, thousands, probably, of reporters and TV reporters were sent down to the Cape to check up on the story. with the result that there's just this amazing resource of digital and microfilm archive newspaper reports. Among that stuff, when I began digging into it, I imagined that the Rogers Commission was going to be something that was going to be examined in great detail. I thought that a team of reporters from The Washington Post or The LA Times or The New York Times would have been detailed in late 1986 after the report came out. to do like a four-part series on inside the Rogers Commission. What happened? How did they make their decisions? You know, what were the key discoveries and who made them? And imagine my surprise when I discovered, when I started digging into the newspaper archives, that for some reason, nobody had ever done that. And so rather than this kind of convenient, ready-made piece of reporting that I just imagined somebody would have done, I did have to go back and start reconstructing the story of the Rogers Commission for myself. So I went into the New York Times archive and started making a day-by-day chronology of everything that happened. I also interviewed Al Kiel, who was the executive director of the commission, who was William Rogers'chair. He was William Rogers'right-hand man, so he knew everything that happened inside the commission. And I got hold of quite a lot of significant documents that helped me with this. David Elikwu It meant that I was then able to reconstruct the inside story of the way the investigation proceeded. And it turned out to be quite a dramatic story because Rogers went into the investigation treating NASA and its senior managers specifically with great respect, as they promised him full cooperation and full transparency. But what he discovered in the early weeks of the investigation was that actually NASA managers were not being completely honest with him. And he eventually became convinced that some of them were deliberately dissent and trying to mislead him and cover up the reality of what had happened.
- Speaker #1
You mentioned, and you talk about this in the book too, in great detail, there were seven astronauts. We know an awful lot about Krista McAuliffe, whose life was really overshadowed post-tragedy that we don't know much about that you were really surprised by in learning more.
- Speaker #2
The one member of the crew who was surprised to discover had not had a... biopic dedicated entirely to his life was Ron McNair, who was the second African-American in space. But he was the second of three brothers who grew up together in Lake City, South Carolina. And in order to make extra money when he was a kid, he picked cotton in the fields near his house, but then went on to graduate with a doctorate in laser physics from MIT, joined NASA, became a black belt in karate, was an extremely able jazz saxophonist. And one of the fascinating parts of the story was that I discovered that he had actually collaborated with the French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre, who had written a song for Ron to perform while he was in orbit aboard Challenger on the mission. And this was originally planned to be part of a concert that Jarre was going to play in Houston and ultimately did play in Houston. But the idea was that Ron and Nair would perform this song that Jarre had written for him. in space during the middle of this show in Houston, it will be simulcast down from space to Houston and be listened to by the audience in Texas.
- Speaker #1
Fascinating. That's a wonderful story. Yeah. So much was going on in those days. Again, our audience is going to recall a lot of this, but of course, the civil rights movement, there were astronaut selection issues. Ron McNair, of course, as a pilot was able to kind of move beyond that, but this was a diverse crew. Where is NASA today? in facing some of these challenges still probably part of the culture? Are they making some of these organizational changes to kind of move ahead so that we don't have future tragedies?
- Speaker #2
Well, I think that, you know, I'm certainly no expert on NASA as it is constituted now. And they did profess to have learned many of the lessons from the Challenger accident. And the organization was restructured. And a lot of the safety procedures, for example, that had been... abandoned for budgetary reasons in the wake of the Apollo program, as the shuttle program began to take shape, those safety procedures were reinstated. Almost all of the individuals involved in the decision to launch Challenger were either reassigned or left NASA. Well, unfortunately, what happened is that in the years after the shuttle returned to flight in 1988, the shuttle flew safely for a number of years, but a lot of those people who learned those lessons from Challenger in the hardest way imaginable. They grew to retirement age and they left NASA for various reasons, with the result that the institutional memory that was held by those individuals eventually dissipated. So that although those lessons may have been learned in the late 80s and early 90s, by the early 2000s, a lot of those people had left and those memories had been lost and a lot of the complacency and hubris had returned. With the result that the report into the Columbia accident in 2003 explicitly stated that almost none of the lessons of Challenger had been remembered and learned from. And so after 2003. NASA finally set in motion a program to make sure that didn't happen again. So they set up an organization called the Hollow Challenger Columbia Lessons Learned Program. And that has a stated purpose of making sure that the institutional memories learned from those accidents is always kept alive. So those kind of mistakes are not revisited.
- Speaker #1
Wonderful. Adam Higginbotham has been our guest today, author of the new book, Challenger. Challenger. A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. Congratulations, Adam. Really such a wonderful book and so nice of you to spend some time with us. Thanks for taking the time to do that. And look forward to having you come back at some point as you do more work on all of these subjects that you work on, because I know it's going to be of interest to our audience. Thanks so much,
- Speaker #2
Paul. Thanks for having me.
- Speaker #1
Thanks for joining us today with Adam Higginbotham on the Not Old Better Show. Science. interview series on radio and podcast. Today's show is brought to you by Qualia Sinalytic. Please support our sponsors as they in turn support the show. My thanks to our executive producer, Sam Hanegar, for all his work with sound design and everything else. My thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please be well, be safe, and let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show science interview series on radio and podcast. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next week.
- Speaker #0
Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show.
- Speaker #1
Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold.com. dashbetter.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about The Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is notoldbetter and we're on Instagram at notoldbetter2. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next week.
