Challenger

The book took four years to create and it’s a well researched detailed record not just on Challenger disaster but on history of space travel in US and NASA as organization.

Weaving personal stories and backgrounds in-between dry technology explanations and facts, ‘Challenger’ culminates to a single possible conclusion - a tragedy should not have happened and yet it was unavoidable.

The book is much more than a discussion about space travel.

It covers media impact on public interest and therefore funding. It shows how being “first” is misplaced. It lets us peek at what it was like to be a woman or a person of color in a very recent history.

The biggest lesson of it all - no lessons had been learned.

The amazing technology and its promises, the hero men and women who put their instinct of preservation behind the desire to advance mankind, the mission driven scientists and researchers - none of that is sufficient to prevent disasters caused by greed, desire for publicity and poor leadership that dismisses engineers over managers.

It’s hard not to draw correlations to most recent technology races.

Richard Feynman’s (Nobel-prize winning physicist who took part in Presidential Commission on Space Shuttle Accident) summed this perfectly in his “Appendix F: Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle”: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”