Unexpected and profoundly shattering

Last week I had a fascinating conversation with Adam Higginbotham, the author of this month’s pick, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism on The Edge of Space. Before switching to being a full-time author, Adam had a long career in magazines, writing about everything from pop culture to window washers, but now he’s turned into something of a specialist of deep dives into tragedies from our recent past: this book, and its predecessor, Midnight in Chernobyl.

If you’ve had a chance to read Challenger, you’ll know it manages to do a few remarkable things. The first of them, I think, is one of the hardest for a book of history—maybe especially recent history—to achieve. It takes you back to the moment before, drawing a really vibrant, detailed picture of life at the time that really transports you to this moment when Challenger hadn’t yet happened. And that makes it easier to be gripped by the tale of this disaster, and feel some of the shock that people felt at the time. It really gives the story gravity.

We spoke about this and many other things during our chat, and I wanted to share as much as possible of what Adam said, so we’re going to split the conversation in half across this week and next. 

Adam was a young adult in the UK when the Challenger disaster happened. So he wasn’t part of that generation kids who watched it unfold live on TV while sitting in their classrooms. But he was always interested in and excited by space flight.

“I was born in 1968, and even as a small boy, I was already experiencing some sort of nostalgia for the Apollo program: my mother told me that I had witnessed it because she'd got me up in the middle of the night to watch Armstrong take his first steps on the Moon. Obviously, I didn't remember that, but the shuttle program was really my part of the manned space program. I remember watching the launch of Columbia live in 1981, the first Shuttle launch. So it, and the Challenger accident, was a part of my childhood and my adolescence. And I remember the day of the accident very clearly.”

There is a direct line from Adam’s Chernobyl book, published in 2019, to this one. And it’s not just because the two disasters described in them happened within a few months of each other.

“[Challenger] came back to mind because when I was publicizing the Chernobyl book: people would often ask me whether I remembered where I was when I heard about the Chernobyl accident. And of course I didn't, because it was secret when it happened, and information about it leaked out very gradually in the first days after the accident through the Western media. But I would always say, ‘Well, I do remember where I was when I heard about Challenger, which happened almost exactly three months earlier, and that made a huge impact on me.’ So that brought the accident back to the forefront of my mind at the point when I was already starting to try and think of what I'd like to write about next.”

But it was only once he started digging into the plethora of material about Challenger that he realized there was something genuinely new to be done.

“When I began to dig into what actually happened and what was in the record, I realized that I really didn't know very much about it at all. Even though it had made this huge impact on me when I was 17, I didn't really know what had happened. And then I realized that in the intervening 30-something years, all of this other information had emerged and archival material had become available; people directly involved had written memoirs. And so there was a way in which I could tell the story in a way that hadn't been told before.”

“Initially that was just that the story was so often told through the lens of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, that the other six members of the crew who died that day have been lost to a certain extent. So I wanted to make sure that I told their stories. But then, when I started digging into the archival material, I realized that there was a way of telling the stories not only of them, but also the rocket engineers who had tried to stop the launch, and bring them to life on the pages as individuals, as people, in a way that hadn't really been done before.”

The Chernobyl book was influential on him in another way too: knowing an approach to take.

“When I initially began work on the subject of Chernobyl. I did so for one magazine article 10 years before I started work on the book. [...] My then-girlfriend had just given me a copy of A Night To Remember by Walter Lord, which is this fantastic account of the sinking of the Titanic [published in 1955]. It's very economical, very concise. And I thought maybe I could do this for the night of the Chernobyl accident as a magazine story. So that was my initial approach. And you know, Lord—who was a lifelong Titanic obsessive—based that book on archival material from the inquiries that were conducted into the sinking both in the United States and in London, but also by hunting down surviving survivors of the wreck. And when I embarked on the Chernobyl book, because I wanted to try and replicate what he had done, I just looked at the end notes, and I was like: Well, how many survivors did Walter Lord have to talk to in order to bring this story to life this effectively and this brilliantly? I could be wrong, but my memory now is that he got 65 people.”

“So when I embarked on the Chernobyl book, I'd already interviewed probably about 12 or 15 people for the magazine story. But I thought, OK, well, if I'm going to do what Walter Lord did, how many people do I need to find? If I can find 65 people, I'm golden, right? And in the end, I think I interviewed almost 100 people for that book.”

“Then I’m writing my second book about events that took place in early 1986, only I'm doing it five years later than the first one. So there are a lot of people still around from former Soviet countries who were at Chernobyl, but I'm looking for people around for Challenger, and many more of those have since died. So the first thing I did was to get on the phone and start trying to reach eyewitnesses who I could speak to before it was too late. And, in parallel, I then began looking for archival material, for memoirs, for letters—but the first, most important thing to do was to find living eyewitnesses, because that's really the material that you can use to make the story really come to life on the page.”

There were lots of surprises along the way.

“I found a lot of surprising information, talking to the families of the Challenger crew. Some of the most arresting and affecting material in my research, and ultimately in the book, came from spending time talking to them. On the other hand, there were people who I thought would be happy to talk to me and weren't: one retired astronaut asked to be paid to give an interview, which I was a little bit surprised by, so I didn't talk to him. One thing that I was pleasantly surprised by was that the surviving rocket engineers from Morton Thiokol were incredibly helpful and really wanted to make sure that this was a story that was told properly.”

Maybe the most important realization was how shocking the event was for everybody—for the world.

“The thing that stuck out to me when I was interviewing people and talking to them about their experience—and it’s one of the reasons that I thought it was important to write this book—was that it's hard in retrospect to look back 40 years later and realize just how totally unexpected and profoundly shattering the Challenger accident was.”

“Now we live in a world where a space shuttle flown by seven astronauts has disintegrated live on television in front of millions of school children. But up to that point, NASA was regarded as this supremely successful organization, the absolute pinnacle of American achievement, at a time when so many other American institutions have had their reputations tarnished or undermined or destroyed. NASA was the one thing that everybody could be proud of and unite behind.”

“So when you're looking at the footage that was shot from the ground, in the crowd of people watching at Cape Canaveral,  there's a long time there where—even after the shuttle has disintegrated—people are clapping and cheering in a sort of ragged way because they're confused. A lot of people just think that this is what is supposed to happen, because they know that the solid rockets are supposed to part from the main shuttle stack at some point during the launch process, and the commentary is just going on as normal. And so it's clear that this was just such an enormous shock, that it was hard for people to comprehend.” 

“And so that was the thing that really stuck out a lot of the time when I was talking to people, is that I was trying to take us back to a world before this had happened, to explain and show on the page just exactly how utterly unbelievable it was. And for that reason alone, that's why it remains this kind of scar in the American psyche. But it was also the fact that, you know, this was the most, most diverse astronaut crew in NASA history: it was the first mission that was carrying an everyman astronaut, Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher, which made it even more acutely, a group of people really that with whom ordinary people could identify. It was as if you know a part of them was being carried into space that morning. And so I think all of those things together really, really made it a kind of unique experience for for people, not only in the United States, but around the world.”

It’s difficult to remember how incredible and awe-inspiring the Shuttle program was… until those 73 seconds, when suddenly it wasn’t any more.

“It's a point at which there was a real loss of innocence, in the specific sense of people's confidence in high technology being something that's going to deliver a better future. And I think that the Challenger accident is the moment at which that happens for the United States.”

“I wanted to try and explain and show in the book that the Shuttle had by 1986 become this fantastic symbol of American technological know-how and global prowess. You know, the Russians didn't have; there was nothing like this in the Russian space program at the time. And it had achieved all these startling technological feats in the five years leading to the accident, which is, again, something that Challenger and then the Columbia disasters really overshadowed. So I wanted to show in the book, you know, just how amazing a feat it was regarded as before the accident.” 

Next week we’ll hear about some of Adam’s decisions on how to structure the book and how he made it sing.

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Three quick things I thought I’d share before we go.

The National Magazine Awards nominations always produces a good reading list, and I was pleased to see that my friend Lauren Smiley is among those nominated, for her feature in Wired on a gig economy scam ring: “Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia”. Lauren was recently interviewed by both Parker Molloy and friend of the club Erika Hayasaki about her work.

Talking of scammers, Carl Elliot (CUR002) has a review in Science of a book that may be of interest to readers here: it’s about Charles Piller’s Doctored on the fakes, and fraudsters (see the theme?) who have perverted the course of Alzheimer’s research.

To complete the trio, a fresh New Yorker column from Kyle Chayka (CUR008) just dropped, in which he picks apart Elon Musk’s “war on human agency.” It’s an analysis of maybe the greatest misdirection of all that’s been perpetrated on the public.

Onward.