Was the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion inevitable? with Adam Higginbotham

[00:00:03] It was experimental flight, and by its nature it meant that every time they were taking this calculated risk about whether or not it was safe enough to fly, so there was nothing routine about it at all.

[00:00:15] But that constantly tweaking the engineering because you're operating on the very boundaries of what is possible, that was central to the way that NASA operated.

[00:00:24] And so you're always taking extraordinary risks because you're learning from each flight. Every flight is like, I don't know, this didn't work properly this time, what are we going to do about that?

[00:00:35] Are we going to fix it or are we going to ride the odds? And that calculus, that was what the general public had become hugely distanced from.

[00:00:43] And that kind of the danger that was innate in that sort of calculation is something that the engineers themselves, the middle managers at NASA, have become inured to.

[00:00:58] Welcome to another episode of My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher.

[00:01:03] Today I'm bringing back Adam Higginbotham, who was first on this podcast back in episode 16 when we spoke about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

[00:01:13] Now we're talking about his new book, which just won the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction called Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster at the edge of space and the parallels it shares with Chernobyl.

[00:01:29] As you hear more, you will understand why. Pick up your own copy.

[00:01:39] Why did you choose to write a book about the Challenger?

[00:01:45] You seem to think that it's a surprising thing to choose.

[00:01:48] Well, I guess in the end not, because I guess I'm just wondering what other scientific failure you're going to write about.

[00:01:58] Because there's like this combination in both Chernobyl and Challenger in which it's a combination of man's hubris and science, but then it's ultimately the people who pay the price.

[00:02:14] Right. I mean, the stories have a lot in common.

[00:02:17] So that's one of the things that I was interested in, is that there are two events that take place within three months of one another on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and yet for quite similar reasons and under similar circumstances.

[00:02:31] So what led you, I mean, I guess that leads actually to my final question, which I'll ask now, is what's the next one? I was trying to think of another one in that same time period.

[00:02:40] Oh no, never say never, but I'd rather not write about another. I finished with writing about 1986. I don't want to write about another catastrophic design. I'd much rather write about something that goes really well in a very exciting way.

[00:02:57] Yeah, but is that really that fun to write about? I mean, I suggest the KLM disaster. I don't think that's 86.

[00:03:06] Wait, which one is that?

[00:03:07] The one where the Russians shoot down the civilian plane?

[00:03:11] Oh, that's KAL007.

[00:03:14] KAL007, yes. I mean, that could be interesting to look into.

[00:03:18] It could be. I mean, that happened in, I think, 1983.

[00:03:22] I mean, well outside of 86.

[00:03:25] Yes. I don't know. I mean, you say, would that be fun to write about this book? Writing this book was not fun. Working on this book was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.

[00:03:35] It was harder than the Chernobyl book?

[00:03:37] Far harder. Like five times a week. It was just gruesome in every way.

[00:03:42] Why?

[00:03:43] I think because although I remembered that, you know, I technically I lived through the Chernobyl accident, the Challenger accident was something that I had direct experience of and I really remembered very clearly where it was at the time.

[00:03:55] And it had a like a direct psychological impact on me at the time because I was a follower of the space program when I was a boy.

[00:04:01] But also the kind of the I think because when I was reporting the Chernobyl book, there's a lot of cultural difference between me and the people I was talking to.

[00:04:13] So it enabled me to maintain a sort of psychological barrier between myself and the people whose lives I was exploring and reporting on and trying to reflect in print that was not there when I was talking to the families and the engineers and all of the people that were involved in the Challenger story.

[00:04:31] So in the end, it was much more difficult kind of emotionally to address when it came to putting it down on the page.

[00:04:38] It was just much harder to write a book.

[00:04:41] Where were you?

[00:04:42] I was a schoolboy. I was in England. I would turn 18 that year. So I think I was 17 when that happened.

[00:04:47] And because of the time difference and because this was the 20th century, you know, there was no 24 hour news cycle. There was no cell phones. There was no Internet.

[00:04:57] So I was at school when it happened and I didn't find out about it until I got home from school that night. But I can still remember how utterly incomprehensible it seemed that something like this could have happened.

[00:05:08] I mean, like you, I mean, until 9-11, there hadn't been an incident in my life that I remembered so crisply where I was.

[00:05:19] But the Challenger. I was in school. You know, it was the teacher flight, as you write about. And I was in elementary school and they reeled the big TV in that was strapped down to the cart.

[00:05:32] I think there were like three grades that came together to watch the little TV and we watched it live take off and watched it explode. And we just all kind of looked at it like that's not supposed to happen. And the teacher just kind of everybody just kind of stared. And I don't even remember what happened after that. I mean, it wasn't until later that that people actually realized what was happening.

[00:05:59] One of the most surprising things that I found out when I was reporting the story was that so many people are adults now misremember that they watched it happen live.

[00:06:11] It's true.

[00:06:11] If they were adults at the time.

[00:06:12] Yes. Well, if they were adults or if they were children.

[00:06:15] If they were adults at the time, a lot of people say, oh, yes, no, I remember. I remember I was watching that on TV when it happened.

[00:06:22] And of course, the truth is that the majority of people in the United States who watched it happen live were children because nobody was covering it live except CNN. And not many people had CNN at that time.

[00:06:35] So it's something like 1.5 million children were watching it live in classrooms up and down the country, but not many adults.

[00:06:43] So it's funny you say that because my husband is five years older than me. And he said he remembers watching it at lunch with his sister. And when he did the math, he's like, wait, I couldn't have possibly been watching it at lunch with my sister because of the time and when it happened. And he's like, so I was misremembering it. But I do not think I'm misremembering.

[00:07:07] Oh, no. I mean, I don't doubt it. If you're in school at the time, then I'm sure you did. But people who are adults at the time who say to me, oh, yes, no, I'm not like, were you sure about that?

[00:07:18] I would doubt a lot of my memories, but that one I don't doubt.

[00:07:21] I'm sure.

[00:07:23] You didn't actually answer my question. Why? Challenger.

[00:07:25] Partly because I saw that there were a lot of parallels with the Chernobyl accident. I was interested in examining a similar accident that took place for similar reasons, but under very different circumstances in a capitalist society rather than a communist command economy.

[00:07:42] But also because I knew that it was a story that I had been interested in when I was a kid, because when I was a child, I was fascinated by the space program.

[00:07:52] But because I was born in 1968, even as a seven-year-old, I was already suffering from this kind of nostalgia for the Apollo program that I had not been sufficiently aware to witness or know I was witnessing.

[00:08:07] And so the space shuttle program was really my part of the space program. I'd written intermittently magazine stories about spaceflight over the years, but I'd always wanted to write about the space program.

[00:08:20] And as I say, you know, I realize that there are a lot of parallels, especially this idea that was formulated by the sociologist Diane Vaughan, who wrote the entire book about, as you probably know, about the decision to launch Challenger, in which she explains this idea of the normalization of deviance, which is how you gradually expand your acceptance of deviance from the norm in engineering until the point when unconsciously you end up accepting things that anybody who came in at the beginning of the process,

[00:08:50] anybody who came in the program, anybody who came in the program, anybody who came in cold at this point of the program, without having gone through this sort of boiling frog experience, would recognize was extremely dangerous. And that was true of both Chernobyl and of the Challenger accident.

[00:09:03] That's interesting, because there's other engineering issues that could be explained that way.

[00:09:08] So conceptually, it was very similar in terms of the sort of themes that it would explore. But also, you know, I was interested in the story simply as a story. And then when I began,

[00:09:19] the initial research to kind of stress test it to see if I thought that there was material there for a book and whether it was a story that I was interested in spending that much time working on, and whether people would want to read about it, I realized there was a huge amount about it that I just didn't know. Despite having, you know, remembered it from the time, there's a huge amount of information that had come out since it happened.

[00:09:40] And then when I began to kind of go into the archival material, I realized there's just this incredibly rich seam of material from which you could write a completely new story, effectively, where you explain exactly what did happen and who was involved.

[00:09:55] As far as like the story, I think everybody knows it was an O-ring, right? The failure of an O-ring. But it's really not that simple. I mean, or you wouldn't have a whole book, right? It's not as simple as just an O-ring failure.

[00:10:09] You're right. That's the proximate cause of what happened. But the story of how that came to happen goes back.

[00:10:15] Did you come across anything surprising in your research?

[00:10:18] Right. The entire population. One of the most surprising things I came across in the research was to discover that there's this idea that the U.S. public lost interest and enthusiasm for the space program after they'd seen men land on the moon.

[00:10:34] But the reality was that they'd never really been that enthusiastic about it in the first place.

[00:10:38] There was always this question about how dangerous it was and how much it cost, and shouldn't we be spending this money on something else?

[00:10:45] We look back on this, as you had mentioned, with this kind of nostalgia for the Apollo times.

[00:10:50] But the general public wasn't always on board with this idea.

[00:10:56] No. The public enthusiasm for the program really reached its peak around the first moon landing.

[00:11:02] But it definitely waxed and waned over the years.

[00:11:05] And although people were broadly in support of it, you know, there was no – it wasn't as if there was this massive drop-off in opinion polling after the moon landing took place.

[00:11:17] People were always kind of felt quite equivocally about it.

[00:11:20] I don't know what kind of polls they did, and I don't know how you polled children.

[00:11:24] But I'm guessing that, you know, a lot more children were excited about space and the space program than adults.

[00:11:31] But I don't know if that's true.

[00:11:34] Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons why James Beggs, who was the administrator of NASA at the time when they originated the teacher in space program, suggested to the White House that one of the options for the first civilian in space would be a teacher.

[00:11:50] It was because Beggs explicitly recognized and said to his colleagues, there are no better cheerleaders for the space program than children.

[00:11:59] If you want to really galvanize enthusiasm for what we're doing, you need to reach them.

[00:12:04] And so what better messenger for that part of the population than a teacher?

[00:12:09] So what I found, okay, I have to say that I could not believe how on the edge of my seat I was when you were describing the lead up to the challenger launch that ultimately blew up.

[00:12:24] So I know how it ended.

[00:12:27] As I was reading, I knew how it ended.

[00:12:29] Yet, you're describing it.

[00:12:32] And I keep thinking they're going to stop it.

[00:12:36] It's not going to take off.

[00:12:37] It's going to be okay.

[00:12:39] So just kudos on some really great writing there.

[00:12:43] Because I just kept thinking it's going to be okay.

[00:12:49] Even though I knew it wasn't.

[00:12:50] Yeah, I mean, you're not the first person to say that to me.

[00:12:54] And I kind of, for the first person who did say it to me, I was really surprised.

[00:12:58] Because I wasn't consciously trying to generate that in the mind of the reader.

[00:13:03] But I think that part of it is because, and part of the reason I found it quite hard to write,

[00:13:09] is because I wanted to make sure that I was recreating the experience of the people involved in what happened as closely as possible.

[00:13:18] So that meant that, you know, you've got this group of rocket engineers at Morton Fire Coal,

[00:13:22] the contractors who built the solid rockets, who were trying to stop the launch from taking place.

[00:13:27] And they too believed, right up until the final moment, that they were going to succeed in stopping it happening.

[00:13:33] Because they felt that they had a sufficiently clear-cut case to argue from an engineering standpoint

[00:13:38] that it was too dangerous and they couldn't guarantee the safety of the launch.

[00:13:42] And so I think that that's part of that, is because those guys really did,

[00:13:46] they tried incredibly hard and believed right up until it was too late that they were going to be able to stop.

[00:13:52] And the other thing is how many times it got delayed.

[00:13:55] Like, every time you thought, this is the one, and it's not.

[00:14:00] And they get delayed. And they get delayed.

[00:14:03] Yeah. I stayed up way too late.

[00:14:05] Like, okay, this is the time, it's going to happen. It's going to happen.

[00:14:07] And I just finally had to go to bed because it just...

[00:14:10] And then my husband said, it blows up.

[00:14:12] And I'm like, oh, you ruined it for me.

[00:14:14] But yeah, it's... I mean, because one of the questions I'm often asked is,

[00:14:17] is couched as, so this was inevitable, wasn't it?

[00:14:20] Well, I don't think it's inevitable.

[00:14:22] Right. But so one of the interesting things about, you know, what led to the disaster in the first place...

[00:14:28] Wait, wait, wait. Do people read your book before they talk to you?

[00:14:30] Because if they did, they'd know it wasn't inevitable.

[00:14:33] Well, some people do.

[00:14:37] I think people who asked that question didn't read the book because it's obvious it wasn't inevitable.

[00:14:43] Right. But what I was going to say was, I think that on the longest possible timeline,

[00:14:47] you know, when you look at the Space Shuttle Program from its origins in 1969 until its conclusion,

[00:14:55] then an accident of this type was indeed statistically inevitable.

[00:15:00] Yes. Okay.

[00:15:00] But was the loss of Challenger inevitable? Absolutely not.

[00:15:04] You know, because they had so many opportunities to say, you know what?

[00:15:09] I think that if we just listened to these guys who were saying that we shouldn't launch,

[00:15:13] then I think that would be the smart thing to do.

[00:15:15] And then, you know, hours later, there's like another group of engineers saying,

[00:15:19] you know, I think we've got pretty good grants for canceling this launch because of this thing.

[00:15:23] You know, the ice, the ice is going to be dangerous.

[00:15:26] And they overrule those guys.

[00:15:27] That's the thing. It's not just the O-ring. It's not just the weather. It's not just the ice.

[00:15:35] It's just one after another after another. And do you think that if the flight wasn't delayed,

[00:15:43] and if they didn't have so much writing on this first civilian in space,

[00:15:47] do you think if it was just a normal run-of-the-mill flight, it would have been canceled?

[00:15:52] Well, I think that there are aspects of the culture of NASA that was driving in this direction,

[00:16:06] or were driving in this direction for a very long time.

[00:16:09] And part of the reason that the accident was such a shock to people, to the public,

[00:16:14] is because they had been consistently over a long period of time misled about how dangerous space travel really was.

[00:16:24] In a way that the astronauts in the program and the engineers in the program,

[00:16:28] they were never under any illusions about how dangerous it was to launch human beings into space on rockets.

[00:16:34] But one of the aspects of the shuttle program that the public was misinformed about

[00:16:40] was that it was so routine that it was just like flying an airplane off a regular airstrip

[00:16:47] on a scheduled service on American airlines.

[00:16:50] And the misconception that NASA themselves had begun to develop was similar,

[00:16:55] that it was routine and that it was no longer experimental flight.

[00:17:01] But that's crazy.

[00:17:02] It was experimental flight.

[00:17:04] And by its nature, it meant that every time they were taking this calculated risk

[00:17:09] about whether or not it was safe enough to fly,

[00:17:12] and they were constantly tweaking the engineering.

[00:17:16] So there was nothing routine about it at all.

[00:17:18] But that constantly tweaking the engineering,

[00:17:20] because you're operating on the very boundaries of what is possible,

[00:17:24] that was central to the way that NASA operated.

[00:17:27] And so you're always taking extraordinary risks,

[00:17:30] because you're learning from each flight.

[00:17:32] Every flight is like,

[00:17:34] I don't know, this didn't work properly this time.

[00:17:36] What are we going to do about that?

[00:17:37] Are we going to fix it, or are we going to ride the odds

[00:17:40] and calculate that it didn't prove catastrophic last time,

[00:17:45] and that was the first time it had happened,

[00:17:47] so it's probably not going to happen again,

[00:17:48] we'll be okay.

[00:17:49] And that calculus,

[00:17:51] that was what the general public had become hugely distanced from.

[00:17:55] And that kind of the danger that was innate in that sort of calculation

[00:18:00] is something that the engineers themselves,

[00:18:03] the middle managers at NASA, had become inured to.

[00:18:06] So because, as Richard Feynman infirmously remarked later,

[00:18:12] you're playing Russian roulette,

[00:18:14] and you spin the chamber, and you pull the trigger,

[00:18:17] and the gun does not go off,

[00:18:19] only a fool would imagine that you could do it again,

[00:18:22] and the same thing will happen,

[00:18:24] with complete reliability.

[00:18:26] But that's the mindset that the middle managers had gone into,

[00:18:30] is that they'd spun the chamber so many times before,

[00:18:33] and the gun had never gone off,

[00:18:35] that it almost certainly wasn't going to go off this time,

[00:18:37] and they'd be fine.

[00:18:38] What really struck me,

[00:18:39] and this is in my one page of notes,

[00:18:41] is that I found it shocking

[00:18:44] that NASA never thought about

[00:18:47] how they would identify the astronauts,

[00:18:50] if they had to.

[00:18:52] Well, they never really planned for an accident like this happening.

[00:18:56] Which goes to your point of it was so routine.

[00:18:58] They never thought that anything catastrophic could happen,

[00:19:02] because the thought that if it was so critical

[00:19:05] that it would be loss of mission, loss of life,

[00:19:07] that they wouldn't then run the mission.

[00:19:09] Right, well, that's the idea.

[00:19:11] I mean, it's true that the public affairs department

[00:19:14] had devised a plan for what would happen

[00:19:16] if there was a catastrophic loss of the vehicle and the crew in flight,

[00:19:20] but they had become so busy with this routine series of flights,

[00:19:24] and they had such ambitious goals

[00:19:26] for how many shuttle flights they were going to run in 1986,

[00:19:30] that they never had time to practice it.

[00:19:32] Well, they never got fingerprints of the astronauts,

[00:19:36] for example, which I found shocking.

[00:19:39] No.

[00:19:39] I mean, now with DNA, it'd be easy to identify people,

[00:19:43] but in 86.

[00:19:44] Well, the DNA technology did exist in 86,

[00:19:47] but it just wasn't that sophisticated, I don't think.

[00:19:50] And of course, they didn't have any DNA samples to,

[00:19:53] I guess they could have, you know,

[00:19:55] using technology they have now,

[00:19:56] they would use family members' DNA, right?

[00:19:59] But they didn't.

[00:20:01] It was apparently in its infancy,

[00:20:03] but it wasn't sophisticated enough to use for identifying.

[00:20:06] What I also really appreciated is,

[00:20:08] growing up, I only really remember

[00:20:10] Kristen McAuliffe because, you know, teacher in space,

[00:20:14] and then Ronald McNair.

[00:20:16] But I really appreciated getting to know the other astronauts

[00:20:20] that were on the Challenger as well.

[00:20:23] I appreciated all their stories.

[00:20:25] Were you able to speak to family members

[00:20:28] of all of the Challenger astronauts

[00:20:30] to get to know them a little better?

[00:20:32] I spoke to friends or family members.

[00:20:35] I didn't speak to family members of all of them,

[00:20:37] because that was definitely one of my principal aims in the book

[00:20:40] and why I wanted to write the book in the first place

[00:20:42] was because I felt that the way the story

[00:20:45] had been told so often in the past

[00:20:47] was that it concentrated almost entirely

[00:20:49] on Kristen McAuliffe's story

[00:20:51] at the expense of the stories of each of the other astronauts,

[00:20:54] which on one hand is kind of quite understandable

[00:20:57] because of the public profile she had at the time.

[00:20:59] But on the other, she was the least trained member of the crew

[00:21:03] who had spent the least amount of time at NASA.

[00:21:05] So it seemed strange to me that nobody had tried to tell

[00:21:10] the story of the evolution of this crew,

[00:21:12] of each of these personalities,

[00:21:15] each of whom had all of these spectacular achievements

[00:21:18] on the journey that led them to the launch pad that day.

[00:21:22] And then, you know, when I began kind of reporting it

[00:21:24] and talking to their relatives

[00:21:26] and going through the archives,

[00:21:27] it just became more and more astonishing

[00:21:29] because their stories are just kind of so fascinating.

[00:21:33] What facts surprised you the most

[00:21:34] or was most interesting?

[00:21:37] I don't say the most, but what was one of the facts?

[00:21:41] I'm sure you don't want to have a favorite.

[00:21:43] I mean, one of the stories that I found the most,

[00:21:47] certainly the most moving

[00:21:48] and in its own way the most impressive

[00:21:50] is that of Greg Jarvis,

[00:21:51] who was really the other civilian

[00:21:53] who was on the mission,

[00:21:55] who was a satellite engineer from Hughes in California,

[00:22:00] who had been a fan of the space program

[00:22:02] since he was a child.

[00:22:03] His story is in a way the most tragic

[00:22:05] because he had been assigned

[00:22:07] to two separate shuttle flights before Challenger

[00:22:10] and was only added to the crew at the last minute

[00:22:13] because he'd been bumped from two previous flights

[00:22:16] by politicians who wanted to take his seat.

[00:22:19] So if that had not happened,

[00:22:21] you know, he would probably still be alive today.

[00:22:24] One of the things, I mean, you end the book with,

[00:22:27] oh my God, I even forgot the name.

[00:22:28] Columbia.

[00:22:29] You end the book with the Columbia disaster,

[00:22:33] which happened when I was an adult.

[00:22:35] And honestly, I didn't even remember happening.

[00:22:39] That's surprisingly common.

[00:22:41] A few people have said to me,

[00:22:42] I'd completely forgotten that that happened.

[00:22:44] I mean, I didn't know one of the astronauts' names.

[00:22:47] I mean, why do you think that is?

[00:22:49] Oh, I think there's a lot of good reasons for it.

[00:22:52] Firstly, this is something that I talked to some of the family members about.

[00:22:56] And again, was something that I wanted to make clear in the book

[00:22:59] was that it's hard for us to imagine now,

[00:23:03] and certainly for people who have been born since the Challenger accident happened,

[00:23:06] it's hard to conceive of how utterly inconceivable and shattering

[00:23:13] the fact that the accident happened at all was back in January 1986.

[00:23:17] So I certainly found it hard to believe that it happened when I heard the news.

[00:23:21] And it had the effect broadly within certainly American society,

[00:23:27] and I think around the world.

[00:23:28] The event was a massive loss of innocence for people,

[00:23:31] in the sense that it was the point at which

[00:23:35] the confidence in high technology as being this kind of panacea

[00:23:39] of benefits for the future was sort of snuffed out.

[00:23:42] If I could pinpoint a moment in time at which I stopped imagining as a teenager

[00:23:47] that I was going to be riding a jetpack around the surface of the moon

[00:23:52] when I was in my mid-30s, it was January the 28th, 1986.

[00:23:56] As a society, once you've experienced a moment like that, that's happened.

[00:24:00] That loss of innocence has taken place, and that's not going to be repeated.

[00:24:04] So this is a shocking, shattering event.

[00:24:07] Nobody could believe it had happened.

[00:24:08] By the time you get around to 2003 and something similar happens again

[00:24:13] to a space shuttle crew being lost in flight,

[00:24:16] that's not as shocking because it's kind of already happened,

[00:24:20] and people are prepared psychologically for it to happen.

[00:24:23] But the other major reason that I think that it's sort of lost in people's memories

[00:24:28] is because it happened less than two years after 9-11.

[00:24:32] And 9-11 is really the, I think it's arguably the last time there was a global event

[00:24:39] that took place in a few minutes that everybody witnessed and experienced in a similar way.

[00:24:45] And so I think that that really overshadowed what happened to Columbia in February 2003.

[00:24:52] You had talked about how after the Challenger, NASA kind of cleaned up its act

[00:24:57] and decided that they were going to pay more attention so Challenger didn't happen again.

[00:25:02] Yet everyone falls back into their comfort zones and things fall aside and Columbia happens.

[00:25:10] Do you see these similar patterns happening with SpaceX and other private companies

[00:25:16] that are exploring space?

[00:25:19] Well, I don't want to kind of get out of my lane here because I'm not.

[00:25:23] I spent a long time working on the Challenger book,

[00:25:25] but to the extent that I have expertise in the subject, it stops in 2003.

[00:25:29] So as an unqualified talking head, I would say that what I see happening now is very different.

[00:25:37] And the best evidence you have for that is the fact that these two astronauts

[00:25:41] that remain stranded on the International Space Station are there because when it came down to it,

[00:25:49] NASA and their contractors jumped in the opposite direction

[00:25:52] when faced with the decision-making process about calling acceptable risk

[00:26:00] on something where there was a sufficient number of unknowns about the engineering involved.

[00:26:07] They had had problems with the thrusters on the Starliner capsule,

[00:26:13] and they thought that they would probably be okay, but they couldn't be certain.

[00:26:18] And I think certainly if faced with the same decision 40 years ago,

[00:26:22] that kind of experimental mindset of consistently getting away with playing Russian roulette

[00:26:28] would have encouraged them to say,

[00:26:31] no, I'm sure it'll be fine.

[00:26:32] Let's go ahead and do it.

[00:26:33] What are the risks really?

[00:26:35] But in this case, they didn't.

[00:26:36] They did the opposite.

[00:26:37] They said, no, there are too many unknowns.

[00:26:39] We're going to keep them up there until we can assure that we can bring them back safely.

[00:26:44] So no, I don't think it's the same culture at all.

[00:26:47] But it took the Columbia accident to change the culture at NASA

[00:26:51] for them to actually introduce a program of instruction

[00:26:55] that continues to refresh people's memories about the lessons learned in those three accidents

[00:27:01] when you include the Apollo 1 launch platform.

[00:27:04] What about private companies with spaceflight?

[00:27:09] What about them?

[00:27:10] Okay, getting into uncomfortable territory.

[00:27:13] No, no.

[00:27:13] I mean, I just want to make it clear that I have not researched this.

[00:27:18] All I know is what I read in the newspaper.

[00:27:21] Okay.

[00:27:21] I was just curious if you think there is a danger once you have private companies involved

[00:27:30] in space travel that this culture of putting lives on the line is going to change.

[00:27:39] Well, I think it could do easily because if you look at the way that SpaceX conducts themselves,

[00:27:44] they take enormous risks with the engineering that they're deploying on a weekly basis.

[00:27:50] And it seems kind of impressive and exciting and envelope pushing when they're doing it at the moment

[00:28:00] because they're always doing it with unmanned, uncrewed vehicles and equipment.

[00:28:07] And so when things disintegrate in the upper atmosphere, they just kind of make a gag out of it almost.

[00:28:15] What do they call it?

[00:28:16] Unscheduled in-flight disassembly or something.

[00:28:19] Because from a PR standpoint, they've chosen to kind of own the moment in a way that NASA was never able to

[00:28:27] because it's not so obviously government money being spent.

[00:28:30] It's not your tax dollars at work, even though in SpaceX's case...

[00:28:34] It is.

[00:28:34] It surely is.

[00:28:36] As you said, it's obvious.

[00:28:38] Yes.

[00:28:39] But, you know, if they extend that kind of mindset into crude flight, then...

[00:28:44] And that's interesting because even in your book, most of the astronauts said,

[00:28:48] it's a risk I'm willing to take.

[00:28:51] Like, they were willing to put their lives in danger.

[00:28:54] Yes, as long as they knew what the risks were.

[00:28:57] The reason so many astronauts who were at the Johnson Space Center at the time of the Challenger accident,

[00:29:03] astronauts who were in the astronaut office at the time of the Challenger accident,

[00:29:06] the reason that so many of them were so angry afterwards was not because they thought that it wasn't risky.

[00:29:12] This is a kind of canard about the Challenger accident,

[00:29:15] is that the astronauts who were on Challenger were unaware of the risks.

[00:29:18] They thought that it was like riding an airline,

[00:29:21] and they were these kind of ignorant, guileless martyrs to the space program,

[00:29:25] which is not true at all.

[00:29:26] They understood the risks very clearly, but they did not know specifically the history of failures of the O-rings and the solid rockets.

[00:29:34] And so they were angry that this information had been kept from them.

[00:29:38] Because several of them said after the accident happened, and we'll still say today,

[00:29:43] had I known what the risks were and the failures of the O-rings and the solid rockets,

[00:29:48] and the history of design faults in the solid rockets,

[00:29:51] had I known that, and they told me,

[00:29:54] I would still almost certainly have made the decision to fly,

[00:29:58] because that was the business I was in, you know, and I wanted to fly into space.

[00:30:02] But what made them angry was the fact that this information had not been widely shared.

[00:30:10] Thank you for listening, and congrats to Adam for his well-deserved win.

[00:30:15] I'm looking forward to read what he has in store for us next.

[00:30:19] As always, please rate and review our podcast to help others find us on a variety of podcasters out there.

[00:30:27] Until next time, I'm Shelley Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life.