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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Brian McCullough
Could the Challenger disaster have been avoided? Why was the space shuttle program almost canceled so many times? And is there a Mandela effect here? Do you really actually remember watching the Challenger explode today? Rad 80s 90s history is looking at the Challenger disaster. Welcome to Rad 80s 90s history, a podcast looking at the last two decades of the 20th century. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Usually I say it's a history of the last time things were relatively normal and chill, but today we're going to be talking about something that was definitely not chill and in fact might maybe be the emblematic traumatic news event for folks who grew up in the 1980s to talk about this today. My special guest is Farhad Manju. Farhad has been a New York Times columnist. I mean, he's been a columnist as long as I've been reading people on the Internet, Slate all over the place. Farhad, thanks for coming on the show.
- [01:37]
Farhad Manjoo
Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really look forward to this.
- [01:41]
Brian McCullough
Do you remember where you were when the Challenger blew up?
- [01:46]
Farhad Manjoo
By the way, there's definitely a Mandela effect there because I was actually in South Africa, which is where I'm from. And I came here. We came here like two years after the Challenger exploded. And so I can't imagine I have a distinct memory of watching it in a classroom, but I don't think that actually happened because I don't think we would have watched it in South Africa.
- [02:14]
Brian McCullough
Please save that because I have done a little research into that and I have a theory about that.
- [02:19]
Farhad Manjoo
Okay? So, yeah, I mean, I know what that iconic picture looks like and I've seen the video, but I do have a memory that may be a false memory of actually watching it.
- [02:32]
Brian McCullough
I was in the second grade and I confirmed this with my mother because she was a teacher at my school. I said I wasn't watching it, right? She said, no, I took you out of class and I told you about it. So like I said, we're going to get into that. But actually, when I reached out to you to see if you do an episode for this show, you mentioned that you had just read a book which I had just read, which is called A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham. It was a pretty amazing book, right?
- [03:08]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, it was so good. I read his book about Chernobyl, which he wrote right before this, and I was like, blown away in that book about all of the details he had. And then the details in this are even sort of. It's amazing. It's sort of like amazing journalism, but also just like, really interesting stuff about science and, like, how America worked.
- [03:26]
Brian McCullough
It's just great science. And I would say bureaucracy for both of those stories. You know, a lot of that is, you know, the. The COVID your ass stuff and the why did you make this decision stuff. And so to get into it, in a weird way, I feel like we're going to spend half our time talking about the space shuttle program itself, or maybe even the space program itself, because in a way, this is sort of. It leads up to this disaster. But the story here, we could start with just, you know, the moon landing, 1969, a decade's worth of work, Kennedy, the space race, the Apollo program, the, you know, the iconic images of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, hopping around, playing golf on the moon, and things like that. The entire space program was huge in the. Especially in the 60s, NASA had some 400,000 people working on the Apollo program at its height. The price of the support facilities alone was $2.2 billion, the total cost to the country to put people on the moon. The entire Apollo program was $28 billion, which was the equivalent of a third of all of the US military spending for 1969, which was the height of the Vietnam War. So it wasn't a third of all of the military spending on the Vietnam War, but it was a third of spending of probably one of the prime years of the Vietnam War.
- [05:10]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, and it was. I mean, I think the reason it was justified was because of the Cold War, because we were sort of like, you know, in addition to the scientific curiosity and everything else, we were in an arms race and we wanted to sort of demonstrate this amazing capability. And, like, Americans had been scared of Sputnik, and so you had this real, like, nationalism aspect to it. And then, I mean, what's interesting about, like, what happens after is that, like, the entire sort of reason for the space program kind of goes away, and then they need something else.
- [05:43]
Brian McCullough
Getting to that. Exactly. Right Now, I was surprised by a couple things that we can hit right here, which is, number one, the degree to which people's interest in the whole moon program fell off a cliff.
- [05:57]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah.
- [05:59]
Brian McCullough
There were six total moon landings. The first in July of 1969, the last in December of 1972. And there's a Gallup poll taken at some point after mission three or four or whatever that said 53% of Americans opposed moving on to doing like a Mars landing or something like that. And there was another poll that said more than half the public wanted the President to spend less on space exploration. Now, historically, from the 60s into the 70s, we've just had, as we mentioned, the Vietnam War, which sort of kicked the legs out from under the finances of the Great Society. Right. But also the 70s is known as a decade of austerity, of oil shocks.
- [06:45]
Farhad Manjoo
Right.
- [06:45]
Brian McCullough
Stagflation. So there's a sense that we kind of can't afford to do everything anymore. And so one of the things, there's two things going on. The American public is sort of losing interest in this. There were rumors that, like the last landing on the moon, the government might have put pressure on the TV networks to even cover it.
- [07:12]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, yeah.
- [07:13]
Brian McCullough
So the government is seeing here, which is amazing.
- [07:16]
Farhad Manjoo
Right. Like, imagine if people landed on the moon today. I feel like I'd be. Everyone would be watching it.
- [07:20]
Brian McCullough
You know what? I'm of two minds about that because, number one, especially for the ability now, you would have better cameras and better video and you could see more things like think of the grainy images and things like that. There was one or two cameras they could use. It was pretty boring. They're hopping around now. I feel like you'd have GoPro like cameras and you could see them picking up the moon rocks up close. So that's true. On the one hand, I feel like it makes sense. There wasn't a lot to do, but at the same time, people still get really excited about every SpaceX launch. But again, maybe it's just better production quality now is the answer.
- [07:58]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. Also though, there's this aspect of we've done that and Americans get bored very quickly.
- [08:08]
Brian McCullough
Yeah. And so the idea was we would move on to Mars or whatever. But again, austerity comes in. So there's two things going on. The government has sort of had their win. They're seeing that the public interest in the space program is waning. There are actual financial restraints coming in that they can't spend as much. There's not really a reason to spend as much. And so, number one, what NASA is looking at is sort of an existential threat. Like, what is our mission? What are we supposed to do? If we're not going to Mars and we have to do things cheaper, then what are we. What is it that we're going to do? And one of the things that the book describes as sort of like the compromise solution or maybe the brilliant way to, like, spin this is, well, no, we don't have to go to Mars and then the Saturn or whatever. What we'll do is we'll make spaceflight seem as common as jumping on an airplane.
- [09:12]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, it was like, make it accessible. We can do it many, many times. The amazing thing is the sort of the numbers they predicted of how often they'd fly there and we'll find out, they were totally off. But the idea, I mean, even the name, the Shuttle, it was sort of like going to be something that you would just use all the time and it would go back and forth. And that reusability was like, you know, a key way to combat this idea that it was going to be expensive. Like, we're going to make it so much more efficient and just like every day.
- [09:43]
Brian McCullough
Because with the Apollo program, every rocket used was destroyed. The only thing that they brought back intact was the actual crew module. And so it's only now, thanks to companies like Space X, that you can reuse rockets to. So to a certain degree, what the shuttle program was was sort of the technology at the time, allowing for a hybrid model. The idea is, can we have rockets that we can shoot up and then they'll fall back into the sea so that we can recover them and reuse them to a certain extent. But what will be completely reusable is they originally were going to call it the Space Clipper, the Astroplane, the Starlighter. They settled on the Space Shuttle, which.
- [10:30]
Farhad Manjoo
I think is a great name.
- [10:32]
Brian McCullough
It is a good name. And as you said, they were planning on doing, like, they wanted to do a flight a week if they could. But to me, this is already. This is the contradiction at the heart of what we're talking about. The government and NASA do not want to give up the magic of spaceflight. They want it to become routine. But that's also in aid of doing it on the cheat. Not on the cheat, maybe that's a little too critical. But cheaper.
- [11:03]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. Right. And so it leads to these. You know, you sort of design it in a way that. In a way that it wasn't. The thing is that what's Interesting about it is that it actually didn't turn out to be on the cheap. So they actually did spend a lot on it. But right at the start you have this idea that like we're going to do things in a way that's just kind of much more, I think, like business. Like we were going to run this like a business instead of like the blank check that we had in Apollo.
- [11:37]
Brian McCullough
Well, or what ocean liners were when it became an ocean liner has a schedule. It will leave a dock every week at this time on this day, or what airlines do now. Your plane to leave at 3:02pm or whatever. When. When President Nixon announces the space shuttle program, he says that it's designed to transform the space frontier of the 70s into familiar territory easily accessible for human endeavor in the 80s and 90s. It will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. But again, to me, that's the conflict, which is there's a quote from Higinbotham in the book. In some ways it was as if the 16th century explorer Ferdinand Magellan had proposed to follow up the first circu of the world by rowing across Lisbon harbor and back. So you and I, you and I as kids and maybe Americans generally in the 80s thought this was cutting edge, gee whiz science. And it was. But I wonder what that did to morale inside of NASA. Because they know they are. They're seeing their budgets cut back and they know that they're ratcheting back their ambition basically.
- [12:56]
Farhad Manjoo
Right? They're aiming for something that is sort of. It's like if Apple, like built the iPhone 11 again, sort of like they're aiming for something that they had already done. They're just trying to kind of make it, you know, look like they're like, it's something that you could do often make it more accessible. But they're not. There's no, like, at the heart of it. There's no innovation in the, in the like, goal here. Like, going to Mars would be the next thing.
- [13:27]
Brian McCullough
That would be the Gee whiz, I can't. We're pushing the boundaries of human endeavor versus, hey, we're just going to. Okay, we'll have a cool thing that we can reuse. We'll shoot it up and it'll fly down like an airplane, which is what the space shuttle was designed to do. And what are you going to do up there? I don't know, both spin around for a week or so and do some experiments and yeah, well, they had this.
- [13:49]
Farhad Manjoo
Goal also, this sort of far off thing of the space station and they were, and the shuttle was to get to the space station. They were both sort of like a tandem project. Right.
- [13:59]
Brian McCullough
Well, and this is the second point that I wanted to lay down already. It surprised me the degree to which, and in retrospect this is obvious, it surprised me the degree to which everything justifying the continuation of the space program was because there could also be a simultaneous military use even with the space station they're talking about. Obviously not only the government, but even the CIA still launches their own spy satellites and stuff like that. But the reason that the space shuttle is designed with a 60 foot long, 15 foot wide cargo bay is not only so you can put things like the Hubble Space Telescope up there, but you can also put spy satellites up there. And they literally were thinking about offensive operations against Soviet spacecraft in space if it was necessary. So this is a craft that, as opposed to just a module that's in orbit and has little control other than firing rockets here and there. If we have to go blow up a Russian satellite, maybe we can use the space shuttle to do that. Anyway, like I said, it's obvious in retrospect, but the fact that a civilian space program continued probably wouldn't have happened if they weren't thinking of the military component as well.
- [15:15]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, and I don't remember this perfectly, but this like caused dissension in NASA, right? Like there was this idea that like we are a civilian program and there were people who sort of did not want to build for the military and which was not sort of in high.
- [15:31]
Brian McCullough
Standing at that point, certainly tail end of the Vietnam War. So lining up again, the contradictions. We're still doing great stuff in space, but it's going to be routine, it's going to become commonplace. We're still doing great stuff in space, but we're going to do it on the cheap. The budget allocation that they wanted for the shuttle program was $14 billion. That's what NASA asked for. They got 5.5 billion and I believe even that was cut down. Do you remember from the book, there's this infamous Alan Shepard, the first American in space, about the lowest common, the lowest bidder. Do you remember that?
- [16:15]
Farhad Manjoo
I don't remember the quote, but I remember the sort of.
- [16:17]
Brian McCullough
Yeah, yeah. When asked what he was thinking about when. What was he thinking about? When preparing for launch aboard his Mercury Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, infamously replied, the fact that every part of this ship was Built by the lowest bidder.
- [16:32]
Farhad Manjoo
Right, right.
- [16:33]
Brian McCullough
So from NASA's point of view, now we've been talking about the government's point of view for continuing this, NASA is feeling, like I said, an existential sort of. Sort of Damocles hanging over their head. They're afraid if they don't produce something, then civilian space exploration could just end. And so when they start to. It's not that even with the Apollo program, they were going out to civilian contractors and the lowest bidder would get the contract or whatever. But now they're doing it with. Without a third of the resources of the Vietnam War. They're now doing it sort of like any other sort of military, civilian or government contracting out, where they're for each component of it as opposed to design. They're designing it in house, but they're leaving sort of the details and the bits and pieces to these individual contractors.
- [17:34]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. And they're. And they're sort of overwhelmingly military contractors whose people, companies, whose sort of other business is to be the lowest bidder on, you know, all kinds of things. And this is like, we're talking about, like, the smallest parts. Like, you know, like the thing that, you know, was the failure point was this rubber seal. But, like, you know, imagine how many rubber seals there are on a thing like that. Like, it was. I mean, it's how government works. But it's also like, you would imagine that everything that you would need for a program that is sort of, like, done for the first time wouldn't be kind of off. Like, you wouldn't have any kind of off the shelf part.
- [18:25]
Brian McCullough
Right. So what they end up with is the orbiter, which is the part of the shuttle that the shuttle, it resembles an airplane. It glides back down after coming in orbit. They have the external tank, which is, if you're visualizing or if you see it on YouTube right now, the biggest tank, the center tank, when it launches, that was. It held the liquid hydrogen and the fuel to just get into orbit. That was not reusable. That, you know, was destroyed after each launch. But the two solid rocket boosters on the side were reusable. They would burn off all of their fuel and crash land back in the ocean. But, okay, budget cuts mean that lots of things are cut. A dozen orbiters were originally planned. So a dozen space shuttles were planned, and they only did, you know, half a dozen over the course of the program. As you said, they wanted to launch weekly. They were only occasionally, over the course of the shuttle program, able to go monthly. There were 135 shuttle missions over 30 years. So on average they're only doing four and a half a year now. That averages out that way because after accidents, they shut down the program. Shocking to me. They did things. Among the various cuts that they do, there were always plans to have a escape system so that the crew could jettison if there was something going on in launch. The other thing that shocked me, Farhad, is the first launch of the shuttle system with the two astronauts on there. The first launch ever was a manned launch with people on board to cut costs. Even SpaceX to this day, they do multiple launches before they try to put people on there. But because they have a limited budget and they're trying to rush to prove that they can do something, it shocked me to learn that the first ever launch of the space shuttle with people on it was, was basically the trial run.
- [20:36]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, you know, I'd never thought about the escape system before because like you imagine, you know, if you, if you have a problem in space, you, you can't use an escape system. But like the thing that happened in one of the Apollo missions was like on the launch pad they needed to escape because the thing was on fire. And that was like a big lesson from the Apollo program that they needed to improve the way that somebody could escape from that. And then they just sort of ignored, and then they did that for the rest of the Apollo program and then they just kind of went back on that and kind of ignored it or thought it wasn't like a thing that needed to be done and we can't afford an escape system, basically.
- [21:17]
Brian McCullough
Right. So you're mentioning the, the thing that maybe we should acknowledge also at the top is space travel is dangerous. And we're also at a time where they're still learning as they go. So one of the things that people will ask is, was NASA too reckless or whatever. But we should stipulate up front that this is to this day, going into space is not something that is like air travel, which is relatively safe at this point.
- [21:54]
Farhad Manjoo
Well, that's also the sort of irony here, is that they tried. In some ways their goal was less ambitious because they weren't going to Mars. But also they were sort of aiming for the sky in terms of making it like, you know, like a product, like accessible to everyone and civilians could go on it. They were aiming to do something that, you know, in some ways would, would be more difficult. Especially. This is like, you know, a whole new thing to humanity and we're going to make it like weekly Just an.
- [22:25]
Brian McCullough
Aside, you mentioned the. The fire. The Apollo 1 mission in January 1967, where three astronauts were killed. Again, this wasn't in space. This was. They're testing things on a launch pad. But that story blew my mind because. So there's a fire caused, we think, by a spark. And the reason that it ignited is because at that point, the module's interior, where the astronauts were, was filled with pure oxygen. Now think of the original Star Trek, where the ship is flown by switches and things like that. There's not touch screens. So imagine an interior where there's tons of switches and buttons and lots of opportunities for little things to spark unprotected wires. Also Velcro.
- [23:09]
Farhad Manjoo
Velcro, the sort of role that Velcro played in that, basically, because it's extremely flammable and they had it everywhere in the cabin because they had, like, checklists that they had up and so. And, you know, and they knew that this was a problem and, you know, again, sort of like overlooked it.
- [23:34]
Brian McCullough
Well, I would say that they learned lessons from it to. They changed the management and safety culture after that. But it is weird to think that it possibly happened because someone pulled a Velcro thing off the wall where the clipboard was, and that's what did it. So NASA is not unfamiliar with the danger, not unfamiliar with disasters, but they also want to, like they say, show that this is something that can become commonplace and something that's reliable. To do this with their goal of maybe launching once a week, they throw open the applications for astronauts to plenty more people. The Apollo program, there were maybe a few dozen because there were only so many missions. But if you're going to do a mission a week, they're throwing open the astronaut program to hundreds of people. I'm not going to suggest that they lowered the standards in terms of training because what they actually did was they sort of bifurcated the roles. On a shuttle mission, you would still have the pilots and the people that were supposed to know how to get something into orbit and how to get it back and do all that stuff. But then because you're going up to do scientific experiments and things like that, they. They create new roles, new, new actual, like titles like payload specialists and mission specialists. And that would be. Well, I'm not. I've gone through astronaut training, but maybe not as intensively as the pilot because I'm strapped into the back and I'm just along for the ride, essentially, because once we get into orbit, I'm the scientist that's going to do the experiments.
- [25:29]
Farhad Manjoo
Right. There's this aspect, though, of a lot of this being marketing for NASA. Like we're going to make it, we're going to have civilians on it, we're going to make it accessible to a wider number of people. And each time they sort of announce this and then they had this huge contest to pick the civilians. It was, it was marketing. NASA was in the news kind of constantly because of these initiatives.
- [25:55]
Brian McCullough
So those are two separate things. But I'll get to that right now. So a lot of times when a.
- [26:01]
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- [28:08]
Brian McCullough
They'Re throwing open the astronaut program to more people. I think I saw that there were like 25,000 applications in the sevent. 8,000 were considered. So they're doing real numbers in terms of like putting you through space camp. But they are also clamoring as you said for this idea that okay, if we are going to have routine spaceflight then we should have normal folks up there, we should have civilians up there. And it was made known that NASA was considering this and lots of people jumped on this and thought it was a great idea. The writer Norman Mailer campaigned hard that he should go up. Walter Cronkite, the news anchor apparently was very interested in going up. John Denver was mentioned celebrities.
- [28:57]
Farhad Manjoo
Well I just want aside on that. It's like I found that kind of mind blowing. And like really a Testament to the 80s is like or 70s and 80s is like as being like sort of better than our time is like he considered like normal people. And the only people we consider to go up in space now are billionaires and poof funding.
- [29:17]
Brian McCullough
Right.
- [29:17]
Farhad Manjoo
So like that's our, that's our version of the school teacher.
- [29:21]
Brian McCullough
They, they were talking about doing things. They talked about potentially opening it up to rich people to pay their way. But also introducing shuttle clubs where you could pool your money and you know, sort of become a part of it. But who were the actual first non real real astronauts to go up were. This blew my mind. Politicians.
- [29:45]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, I did not know that either.
- [29:48]
Brian McCullough
In 1985 Senator Jake Garn went into space as part of the shuttle program. And in 1986 Representative Bill Nelson of Florida became the second sitting member of Congress to travel aboard the space shuttle Garn.
- [30:07]
Farhad Manjoo
This is like right before the Challenger, right?
- [30:08]
Brian McCullough
Or very soon I'm going to come to that. But Garn, this is from the book. Garn maintained that it was a constant constitutional necessity for him to fly aboard the shuttle as an observer, a payload specialist whose expertise was to understand where taxpayers money was going, which is a bunch of bs. Finally what they decide on and we skipped ahead because we didn't mention that the shuttle program begins in 1981. And so 1981, 1982, 1983 they're launching missions not like we said, weekly as they wanted, not even monthly because they are finding problems all the time. So the heat tiles were a problem, the landing gear was a problem at some point. So every time they go up, because they hadn't spent years testing this, they're finding things and they're having to fix things on the fly. But in 1984 President Reagan announces that the first civilian non politician to go into space will Be a teacher. He announces the teacher in space program. More than 11,000 teachers apply. Apparently, instead of the teacher, the thing that almost happened was a journalist. They were going to send a journalist. So Farhad, as a journalist, would you go now, would you have gone into space in 1984?
- [31:33]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, I definitely would go either time, yeah.
- [31:36]
Brian McCullough
Really? Because I would definitely not.
- [31:38]
Farhad Manjoo
Oh, really? I mean, I like have kids and stuff, but like, so I don't like, I want to go skydiving, but I haven't. But going to them, going to space, that's. I mean, especially in the 80s, like, I would have jumped at that.
- [31:54]
Brian McCullough
When you were a younger man and had no. Yes. No responsibilities. Right. One of the things that we need to mention is that I said that the shuttle program begins in 81. It was almost canceled several times before it even has its first flight. During the Carter administration, it came very close to being shuttered, which is why they're trying to get the darn thing in the air. There's a quote from the book that says one of the engineers involved thought that the chances of a disaster happening on the very first shuttle flight were 50, 50. But it succeeds. Even after it succeeds, the delays are bringing pressure on NASA because again, the government was promised this would be routineizable. This would be something that would be happening on the regs. They're unbeknownst to a lot of people at NASA. Some of the contractors are also getting concerned about the technology. And this is where we should bring in Morton Thiokol. It's a weird. Yeah. Call. That's a good way. Yeah. So Thiokol is a defense contractor or just an engineering firm that is responsible for creating the two booster rockets that.
- [33:21]
Farhad Manjoo
Are on the side, the solid, the solid fuel ones, which were like the novel technology on the space shuttle.
- [33:30]
Brian McCullough
They had feared that on the very first launch that those solid rocket boosters were this close to igniting on the launchpad. For years they were modeling the effects of the rockets exploding during launch because again, those rockets only have to get the shuttle into orbit and then they fall back down to Earth. So the only problem that they have to deal with is the firing, the initial stage leaving the atmosphere. But because again of budget cuts and time constraints, they were cutting corners in the sense that they didn't have full scale test data for drawing conclusions about how the boosters would work. As you're going through the atmosphere and air pressure is changing and things like that. They had never been flight tested. Never been flight tested. The only firing tests that they had done at their corporate head or, you know, test grounds or whatever in the Utah desert were. They would turn them on their sides and turn them on and fire them. They had never shot them in the air. They had only. They had never shot them vertically. They had only shot them on the ground.
- [34:42]
Farhad Manjoo
And. But they had this idea that they could make up for the parts that they hadn't tested by building in redundancies. And so they had this very. I was surprised to see sort of like how sophisticated their list of redundancies they had. And they had various parts that had no redundancies and they had strict regulations about it. And the failure happened on one of the redundancies.
- [35:11]
Brian McCullough
A redundancy that I would argue, though, is there because of a corner cut, which is. The rocket boosters are huge. They're nearly 15 stories tall. They weigh 590 tons. They're the largest solid rockets built to that time. Now they're so big that you cannot transport them across the country from where they're constructed easily. So you have to cut them into sections and then reconstruct the sections once you're at Cape Canaveral. So those rocket boosters are coming in these sections from Utah to Florida. Farhad, what would have been the logical solution if you had more money?
- [35:57]
Farhad Manjoo
Put the factory right next to it.
- [35:59]
Brian McCullough
Exactly. But because they don't have the money to do that, they're putting them in pieces and then reconstructing them. And because they're in these segmented pieces, that's where the O ring design comes from. It's not one single chamber, it's multiple chambers. And the O rings are designed to essentially allow the fuel, you know, the, the fuel to move through the entire structure without it being one single structure. And the way to think of the O rings are sort of like in plumbing.
- [36:35]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. At that seemed. Yeah.
- [36:37]
Brian McCullough
Or like the gasket in your kitchen faucet or in a carburetor or something like that, where when pressure is applied that it's sort of like not really a foam, but similar to a foam where it will expand to fill and seal the various segments.
- [36:55]
Farhad Manjoo
Right. It's, it's. And it's that kind of. I don't know. I don't think it's actually rubber. Maybe it was, but it was that. That kind of rubberized material that is supposed to expand to fill sort of the gaps.
- [37:08]
Brian McCullough
Right. It said it was a synthetic rubber compound. These O rings, they were only a quarter of an inch thick, but they're 37ft in circumference. Again, so large that they have to be shipped on railroad cars from, I think it was Kentucky or to Florida or whatever. They, the company. How did you pronounce it again? Is concerned from the beginning about the. How reliable these are. This material is. Because if you think about it, you know, it's in the middle of a blast furnace. From some of the early launches, they're seeing weird scarring and that. That shouldn't be happening, which is suggesting that the seals aren't making a full tight seal. And so the. They knew from the beginning that it was. This was a delicate, as you say, part point of failure for the whole system. Yeah, but I think that what they. They figured is that they felt like at one point. This is from the book, they made a calculation that a pair. Quoting now a pair of solid boosters could be expected to undergo a failure, resulting in the loss of crew and spacecraft once every 18 to 30 missions. But the idea is you want to launch once a week. So they're taking calculated risks where they're saying, hopefully we'll be able to get through the first dozen flights and we'll be fixing things as we go.
- [38:58]
Farhad Manjoo
Right, right. And then that accounted for the delay between the flights is like they were noticing problems, and one of the problems was the seals.
- [39:06]
Brian McCullough
Right. So like we mentioned, the reason that they're only averaging four and a half flights a year is because as they're noticing problems, they're delaying, but they're also noticing things when it's on the launch pad. And you could, you know, they're actually. They're 10 seconds away from firing the rockets and abort, abort. Because we're seeing this problem, that problem. So on the one hand, it's not that they're being reckless and just going full scale ahead. They are trying to fix problems, but they're fixing problems on the fly.
- [39:36]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, I had a little bit of a mixed reaction to the whole program, which is like they were clearly cutting corners. But also it's. It's just so incredibly complex. I think that at the time, it was like the most complex thing we've ever built. I don't know if, like the Large Hadron Collider or something as bigger since, but like, it was. And so there's this, like, you know, when they, when they launched the first one and it works, I was like cheering for them because it's amazing that they were able to do this. And, you know, despite all the budget cuts and everything, they made this incredibly sophisticated thing and it worked. You know, sometimes to bring it back.
- [40:14]
Brian McCullough
To the Teacher in Space program, which is announced in 1984. The shuttle disaster happens in January of 1986. So there's a two year period here where NASA announces this program, takes applications. And Sharon Christa Corrigan was born in September 1948. She met Steve McAuliffe at their small Catholic high school that they attended in Massachusetts. They marry in 1970, have two children. She was at National Honor Society in high school. She gets a master's in education, becomes a teacher, teaches American history, English and civics. At the time of the Teacher in Space project, she's teaching at Concord High School in New Hampshire. She sent in her Teacher in Space application on the last possible day in February of 1985. And one of the things that I found outside of the book was when she was a kid and John Glenn orbited the Earth for the first time, she told a friend in high school, do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon, maybe even taking a bus? I want to do that. Which is ironic. That's again the routinizable space flight idea. On her application form for the Teacher in Space program, she writes, I watched the space age being born. I would like to participate. Out of the applicant pool, there are 114 semifinalists from each state or territory. So she's one of the finalists from New Hampshire. She becomes one of the 10 finalists nationwide after being selected. And she finally becomes the teacher selected. She takes a year of absence from teaching. NASA pays her salary, and as I mentioned, she does receive astronaut training, which again though I feel like the book sort of paints as it was astronaut training that maybe you or I could survive. So maybe not the rigorous astronaut training that had happened previously.
- [42:22]
Farhad Manjoo
Right, right. I thought she was amazing, like 100%. It's the way that, like, what I especially loved about it was like, so she becomes a celebrity and is interviewed by kind of everyone and every. And it, you know, reignites interest in the space program. And the reason everyone was watching the Challenger, you know, explosion, the reason school kids were watching it was because there was this teacher in space. But she just seemed like an incredible teacher. Like, just like the way, the way that she positioned the, you know, in her application and in the way that she was talking to the media, the way that she talked about the mission as like part of education and kind of educating Americans and her own students in science and just, it just seemed like, you know, we don't have teacher celebrities anymore. I guess we kind of do with like the vice presidential candidate, but like, it's not. It's unusual. And like, you know, it was really cool that she just like became this huge star.
- [43:29]
Brian McCullough
It's one thing to be brave and say, I'm going to go into space, but it's another thing to be brave enough to take on the role of being a role model of I am going to be the face of humanity's attempt to continue to explore space, but also at the same time be the face of sparking interest in science and things like that for children. So, right. She's incredible. She's personable, she's funny, she's charismatic. She goes on Good Morning America, she goes on Johnny Carson. Johnny asks her about the mission and she says, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat, just get on. The plan is that she's going to do some experiments but also teach lessons from space. So she's going to do some science experiments around hydroponics, magnetism, Newton's laws, that sort of stuff, which again, as opposed to being a teacher in a high school trying to do Newton's laws, where you can't really do it right, but you can actually do that because you're in space and there's no gravity and stuff like that. It's an amazing concept. Cheese also had a module called the ultimate Field trip. Lessons about the benefits of space travel called Where We've Been, Where We're Going. And this is key. NASA says what we'll do is we're going to broadcast this to millions of school children via closed circuit tv. So it's not just she goes on the Tonight show or she'll be on cnn. We're also going to beam this into classrooms. That is part of this is we want this to be sort of a teaching moment from space.
- [45:13]
Farhad Manjoo
I mean, I just wonder, like, was there no kind of, I don't know, risk analyst or something there that said, you know, this like, could end very badly if all the kids are watching.
- [45:28]
Brian McCullough
I guess we'll come to that at the end. But by the way, I do want to mention there are six other astronauts on this mission and she's the one that's remembered because of this program. But there were NASA lifers on this flight. They were former Air force pilots. Ronald McNair was the second African American ever to go into space. This wasn't his first flight. Ellison Onizuka was the first Asian American to go into space. Greg Jarvis hadn't been in a space before, but he was in the Air Force. He had, okay, he was the one that had been scheduled to go up earlier but got bumped twice for the two politicians.
- [46:12]
Farhad Manjoo
Right.
- [46:13]
Brian McCullough
So he was supposed to go up in April of 1985, got bumped for Jake Garn. He was supposed to go up in January, earlier in January 1986, but was again bumped for Bill Nelson, who Bill Nelson might have been on the flight before the Challenger. I should have looked that up. The launch of this particular flight, like many shuttle missions in the year and six months prior to it, kept being delayed. So it was supposed to happen not in January, but months before the mission. That this is the 25th space shuttle mission. It's STS51L. They were going to deploy a satellite and then do some other experiments in the months previous. The 15th shuttle launch, which was the first classified military flight in NASA's history where we assume they put up spy satellites or something, this was the shuttle Discovery had been pushed back due to record breaking cold weather that had swept down the eastern seaboard. So maybe this was a year previous, maybe this was the previous winter. Now the public is kept in the dark about that because they're not even told about this mission because it's classified. But engineers admitted that the three consecutive nights of freezing conditions had caused icing on the launch pad for that launch, which at the time they're thinking is going to damage the again the heat shield tiles. And so that's one of the reasons why that had been postponed multiple times. But back to the contractor, they have been growing worried. They've been seeing the problems with the O rings in terms of maybe they're not making a seal, so they're getting scorching. But they have become concerned about the temperature for the O rings because if the temperature goes too low, the foam is not as flexible, the material is not as flexible and might not make a seal. And if that happens, then again you have this hot fuel at God knows the temperature that could be leaking out, that could be going into other compartments that it's not supposed to go into yet that again could explode. They express this internally at the company, but okay, NASA's under pressure to keep the space program going and the contractor is under pressure not to lose this huge contract.
- [48:50]
Farhad Manjoo
Right? Maybe wrong, but I think it's like their biggest thing, right?
- [48:55]
Brian McCullough
I think it was their biggest contract that they had. Right.
- [48:59]
Farhad Manjoo
And they were a subcontractor of Lockheed, right?
- [49:02]
Brian McCullough
I think so. Right, right. So, right. You give a big contract out to somebody, somebody else subcontract. Somebody else subcontract down to as you're saying like screws, specialized screws could be subcontracted out to somebody. At the same time, there are signs of stress at NASA in the sense that there are 14,000 contractors and NASA employees working at the Kennedy Space center at this point and they're working 12 hour days, seven days a week, often for months at a time without a day off because they're trying to keep to these schedules. They're already falling behind schedules. Hey, it's been two months and we haven't had a launch. When are we going to be able to launch? This is quoting from the book. Technicians had begun routinely skipping hundreds of maintenance requirements and some of them began to fear for their jobs if they reported accidental damage. I want to stress again, it's not that they're missing, they're trying to be safe, they're trying to do all the checklists. But the term that keeps coming up in the book is what is an acceptable risk. What are you're weighing the scales of. It's been three months, I think we've got the problem fixed. Can we just go so that we can go.
- [50:21]
Farhad Manjoo
There's also like this compartmentalization of knowledge where the engineers who are working with the O rings have some, have some worries about it and then they tell it to their bosses who sort of like change it and paint it a little better for the people, their contractor. And the people at NASA seem like there's all these. It was interesting because they don't have, like, they don't have the Internet. So they have, there's all these conference calls and they spend a lot of time on the phone in conference calls. And it just seems like the meetings are very unproductive because like the engineers are sort of pointing out what's wrong and then the, the bosses are sort of pushing back and being like, well, you know, we can still launch though. Right?
- [51:03]
Brian McCullough
Right. And we're going to come to a really crucial way that that decision is made here. So the Challenger mission that we're discussing, STS51L, it's the 10th flight for the Challenger itself, it's the 25th flight of the space shuttle fleet, as we mentioned. So all the way into 1986, we've only done 25 flights. I'm bringing that up again because it's not like they had done 100 flights. They're still so early into this. They're supposed to originally launch January 22, 1986. But there's delay, delay, delay for various technical reasons. And when I say delay, it's not just, oh, we're supposed to launch tomorrow, but we scrub it overnight. They would be going onto the shuttle and they'd be maybe even starting the countdown. And it's like, all right, everybody get back out. We'll try again tomorrow. So you've got NASA worrying about the delays. You've got the contractors and the workers at Cape Canaveral. Oh my God, this is, we're not going again. But think about the astronauts themselves. After the fourth time you've been pulled out of that uncomfortable position. Maybe they want to go at some point.
- [52:21]
Farhad Manjoo
There's all these moments where they're about to launch and then they have to stop. And there are astronauts who sort of are wondering if they'll ever fly.
- [52:31]
Brian McCullough
Right, Right.
- [52:33]
Farhad Manjoo
Because they constantly get bumped and yeah.
- [52:37]
Brian McCullough
Sure, well, or you get bumped for a politician. So they're supposed to go up January 22nd. They finally go up on January 28th, 1986. The problem is that overnight there's a cold front. And when I say cold front, this is like the coldest cold front in recorded Florida history or something like that. Like a 100 year cold front. Overnight measurements taken say that around the launch site itself it gets down to 25 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 4 Celsius and, but also different parts depending on where you are. Like it might have gone to as low as 8 degrees Fahrenheit, especially in the morning when the sun comes up. Like there's still parts that are in the shade. And they're initially worried about things like pipes freezing or what is this going to do? Like, what if ice falls off and it hits again, the heat tiles or punctures, I don't know, one of the rockets or whatever. But back at Morton Thiokel, the engineers, especially two of them who have been really concerned about this for years, are raising the alarm about what the temperature will do to the O rings. They implore upon their bosses, we need to stop this launch because of the temperature. The night before, they reach out over conference call. Once they hear about the overnight temperature, they schedule a conference call with NASA. It's held at 9pm the night before the eventual launch. And they get on with NASA and they say, we really don't think you should go because of the temperature. They explain the O ring situation and NASA, this is, I'm not saying this is negligence or criminal or anything like that, but at least according to the book, this is where really NASA is like, oh my God, you guys now are coming to us with this. You hadn't thought of this before. They're really dismissive of it, almost in the sense that if this was a problem, why didn't you bring it to us before? Why are you bringing it to us now?
- [54:59]
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- [57:19]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, and they had the NASA people were sort of relying on the idea that it had previously launched in the cold. And so they were like, as you said before, it seemed like an acceptable.
- [57:35]
Brian McCullough
Failure, the classified mission that had gone up in cold weather, which is ironically why the engineers at the contractor were convinced that there was a problem. But NASA is saying, well, we've already done it, so we proved that it's not a problem.
- [57:53]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah.
- [57:54]
Brian McCullough
Here's the really. And this chapter, I don't know if you felt this way. This is where it really felt like that book Chernobyl or whatever. This was like a real pot boiler. Like, I'm on the edge of my seat. They have the conference call. They get off the conference call, they say, we want to commiserate amongst ourselves. We'll call you back. And in between this and when they call back, they change their tune and they say, okay, NASA, we think you can go. NASA asked them to put that in writing. And so essentially, the contractor delivers a stated decision to proceed with launch. The leadership submitted a recommendation for launch. The teleconference ended behind the scenes. According to the book, some of the engineers that had been essentially whistleblowing on this are not in favor of this, but they're overruled.
- [58:52]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah.
- [58:54]
Brian McCullough
So right there, it's tragic because that they could have stopped the launch right there. They got this close to stopping the launch and blew through that sort of safety barrier there.
- [59:05]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, that's the, really, the moment where you're like, this is like a decision for money. They're doing this for time and money. And like, they're not, like, not money.
- [59:17]
Brian McCullough
It's the pressure of everything. It's my career, it's losing the contract, but it's also, it's. We've got to, we got to produce. You know, I guess it all comes down to money in a way. But reputation wise.
- [59:29]
Farhad Manjoo
Well, I mean, especially at the, at the, at the, at the contractor, if I call, they're like, they're, they're. The reason they change their, their decision is because they're afraid they're going to lose this contract. And it's like, it's like the thing that they're doing, and NASA is their main contractor, and they're also worried that NASA is going to choose some other fuel system or sort of open it up. And so it really seemed like this is on the line for them and they really had to deliver, even if some of their people thought that it was risky.
- [60:00]
Brian McCullough
From NASA's perspective, at least, what they say subsequently, and maybe even at the time is that what we thought happened is that they had gone over their data a second or third or fourth time and thought twice about it and said, okay, this is fine, we've got concerns. But you're right, we looked hard at it and we think we can do it. There's still one more chance for them to stop. Because the next morning when the sun rises, there is so much ice. One of the technicians on the gantry, it's a giant superstructure to get the astronauts up into the shuttle at the top. He says it looks like something out of Dr. Zhivago. There's ice on the gantry. There's ice covering the lower half of the right hand booster rocket because again, one of the rockets, even if part of the, of the craft is in the sun and is maybe melting, the other half might still be in the shade for a while. And so even though by the time of launch, ambient temperature has risen to 34 degrees, so above freezing, which 34 degrees was apparently the formal limits to launch people pointed out subsequently, there still could have been parts in shadows that maybe weren't at that temperature. Also, I don't know if that's enough time to thaw from 25 Fahrenheit to 34, but yeah. So at 11:38am Eastern time, the shuttle lifts off at 11:35. A few minutes before that, CNN switches their broadcast to live video of the launch. The family members of the astronauts are all there on the ground watching. And when the, when the shuttle takes off, everything seems to be going normal. So much so that back at the contractors watching this, the ones that have warned about the O rings and the temperature, literally say, wow, we just dodged a bullet.
- [62:17]
Farhad Manjoo
Right? They're totally relieved. Yeah.
- [62:20]
Brian McCullough
And that's because for 73 seconds everything seemed to be going right. And then we've all seen the footage and it turns out that the failure of. Actually, I'm going to read, so I get the technical part right here. The cause of the disaster was the failure of the primary and secondary redundant O ring seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster. The record low temperatures on the morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber O rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints. Shortly after liftoff, the seals were breached and hot pressurised gas from within the SRB leaked through the joint and burned through the aft attachment strut connecting to the external propellant tank and then into the tank itself. Propellant tank, not good. That's what makes things blow up. This is where we can get into the Mandela effect. Why does everyone remember watching this live? Well, on the one hand, I saw in the book, they estimate that by that evening, 95% of the American public had seen the video of the explosion. And so. Right, most 95% of Americans were at work or at school, so they couldn't have seen it. So part of it is that it was an image that we all saw over and over and over and over. But the reason that a lot of children remember this is because NASA had arranged satellite broadcasts into TV sets in many schools because of McAuliffe's role in the mission. And this is why so many people remember that. The book makes the point that even the people on the ground, like the family members, when it first happens, they're not sure that anything wrong has happened. And there's almost like a half a minute where it doesn't dawn on people. So I wonder. The TV coverage does pull away and the news anchors start to say something seems to have gone wrong. But I don't think it was like, if I was in third grade and I'm watching this, it's not going to occur to me that, oh, my God, they're all dead.
- [64:37]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. One of the amazing things about, like, reading about history now is, like, you can go back on YouTube and watch all this stuff. And I really recommend watching all these videos. It's just like they're an insight into the 80s in, like, multiple different fronts. Like, one is like, I was watching, like, kind of behind the scenes at cnn and they don't have computers and they're calling each other to figure out what's happening. And it's just this amazing, like, scene of a newsroom in the 80s. But what was interesting about it, if you watch these videos, there's videos from the, you know, the perspective of the family watching, and you can kind of hear them, and they. They're not. It's. There's no. There's a little bit of, like, surprise to see it, but there's no gasp, no one. No one thinks it has blown up until, you know, until at least like 30 or 40 seconds later. The CNN. There's a CNN shot of the anchor saying, you know, another successful launch. And then the B roll is on the shuttle as it's going, and the guy's about to cut away. And then there's this spark. And, yeah, it was not clear what had happened. And you sort of only can tell, like, when you're watching it afterward, you can tell that it doesn't look, you know, it's not something good that has happened. But if you were watching it at the time, I don't think that you would have known that, especially if you were a kid. I don't think you would have known that it exploded immediately.
- [66:00]
Brian McCullough
I don't think if you were an adult you would have noticed eventually when you see the two rockets, that famous picture of them, they're sort of flying willy nilly off and. Well, that's not supposed to do that. Right. But again, I'm saying that this is the argument I'm making for the Mandela effect of it wasn't like classrooms full of children were all of a sudden screaming instantaneously. Like it would have been something that even. It would have to be explained to adults. Here's what's happened. Oh God, that sad. So while I can. Obviously this is something that was tragic and impactful, probably not instantaneously, although that does get into my sort of opening line usually of back when things were relatively normal and chill. It's not like the 80s and 90s were perfect, calm, peaceful times, certainly not everywhere on the planet. But something like this being the disaster that people of our generation remember as like that was the tragedy. You know, this is, it's not the equivalent of 9 11, but like that's the closest we have for the. Do you remember where you were when you heard sort of thing?
- [67:11]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, I think that's right. I also think though, like one of the best parts for me about this book was sort of the aftermath because it just shows an America that is just so much better functioning than ours. The whole. They convene. Congress convenes this or the President does.
- [67:35]
Brian McCullough
I think this panel, Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, also known.
- [67:39]
Farhad Manjoo
As the Rogers Commission, actual experts are on this. So there's, you know, there's Sally Ride.
- [67:45]
Brian McCullough
I will tell you. Sally Ride. Neil Armstrong himself. Chuck.
- [67:51]
Farhad Manjoo
Richard Feynman's on it.
- [67:52]
Brian McCullough
Richard Feynman's on it. We'll get to to him in a second. Yeah, they hold hearings and not, you know, we're used to Again, 911 Commission happens years later. Whatever they had, they had hearings and this commission like the month later.
- [68:07]
Farhad Manjoo
And it's not partisan. It's so, it's so interesting because it's, there's no like, there's no like people grandstanding for the cameras. They're, they're like scientists asking like scientific questions and the engineers at the companies are sort of responding and like with the technical details and it just seems like they're actually investigating this which is like, you know, just not something you see anymore.
- [68:29]
Brian McCullough
And nobody's trying to play it for political points and like this Is why. Because you cut so much money. This is why this happened. Or, you know, whatever. We mentioned Feynman. There's very colorful anecdotes of him in the book. He almost didn't sign the final commission recommendation and paper because he thought to a certain degree there was whitewashing going on because NASA wants to continue and no one wants to believe that there was serious negligence at fault. But in these, like you're saying in the hearings, he will to explain how the O rings happen. He'll like take out a cup of water and like a sponge or something and like do like Mr. Wizard style stuff right there in the hearing to explain why what you just said in your testimony was kind of BS because look at this.
- [69:22]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, it's. It's like. It's like demonstrating for the public the science of it. I thought that was amazing. I went back and watched that too, and it's, it's just incredible. And then, yeah, he almost doesn't sign it. They have to allow him to write an appendix where he like, sort of has a dissent of some parts of it in order for him to sign off on it. But like just the. That even that, like the way that they went about investigating it, I sort of wish for that time it was clearly like, oh, and the other thing, it goes into the Ronald Reagan response to it, which has this amazing sort of poem. It sort of ends with. Peggy Noonan writes this speech, like immediately. And he ends with his speech with saying something like, they. They slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. Which is like just such an amazing thing to say. It just seemed like a lot of parts of it seemed like the movie response to a disaster that you would like, want in like an ideal situation that we don't have anymore.
- [70:29]
Brian McCullough
Right. It's almost like a West Wing style, hey, look at when government could function or when everybody's acting in good faith. Right. Almost society can function. I don't want to make note of this, but I think to be a little bit thorough, everyone is hopeful that this thing just exploded and disintegrated. But they spend months combing the ocean for debris. They find debris, they find eventually the remains of the astronauts because it turns out that the crew. What happened is it didn't disintegrate. The way the explosion happened made it break up into pieces. And the crew compartment was essentially intact. And so they determined that the crew compartment falls for 2 minutes and 45 seconds now, granted, at more than 200 miles per hour. So once you Hit the water, you're definitely a goner. But. But they also later determine that some of the oxygen tanks on the flight deck have been used for almost that amount of time. There's also one like, I think it was like it was either the oxygen tank or something that would allow the pilot to get out of the seat. The only way that that could happen is to pull a latch from someone sitting behind them and that latch had been pulled. So it seems likely that at least some of the astronauts were alive as they're crashing to earth, unfortunately.
- [72:14]
Farhad Manjoo
So, yeah, I, this is an aside, but I got, I was thinking about this the other day because they determined, you know, the Titan sub that exploded, they. Yes, there was, there was this theory that they knew they were going to die because they, they like dropped their weights. But in fact there's this new investigation that suggested that they didn't know and it just kind of actually happened like the way we sort of would. It wanted the. You might have wanted the Challenger to go where just sort of they didn't know. But yeah, that part of the Challenger disaster is just like chilling the idea that they knew they were going to die for like two minutes as they were falling.
- [72:55]
Brian McCullough
Some of them at least. There's also, there's indication that. Why would you have the oxygen tanks pulled? Because there would have been a loss of cabin pressure. So maybe you would have blacked out. Anyway. We don't need to dwell on this overly.
- [73:12]
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- [75:35]
Brian McCullough
To wrap up here. We've sort of already been touching on this, but this whole disaster has been sort of like a case study for things like engineering safety, whistleblowing. But on a more fundamental level, it's not an accident that the person that wrote this book also wrote the Chernobyl book, because it's also a case study in group decision making and the dangers of groupthink. I'm not saying that there needed to be antagonistic divisions in this program, but everybody, from the contractors to NASA to the government to the astronauts, everybody is incentivized to take these calculated risks. And again, maybe that's what is necessary to do a dangerous thing is to take calculated risks. But. But what do you think about the idea that no one was ever incentivized enough to be like, we absolutely should not go?
- [76:43]
Farhad Manjoo
I ended up feeling like I think that's right. I think that there clearly should have been a larger budget, more testing, and.
- [76:56]
Brian McCullough
Some sort of an ombudsman that can that has the authority to say I'm responsible to nobody. My job here is to if I think it's reached a certain threshold, I overrule everybody. Like in nuclear subs. Like the whole idea of you have to have two keys to launch the missiles, right? Like there didn't seem to be a fail safe, that you reach a threshold. And even though everybody else, 95% of the constituent parts of this program are agonized, somebody has the authority to say no go.
- [77:29]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. I think, on the other hand, I do think that there's a little bit of like space travel is difficult and some accident would have happened and I feel like, I feel like I absolved many of the people of like wrongdoing based on that because like you have to figure out as a society how to do kind of, you know, tough things. Things. Yeah, things that you've never done before as a species and that are dangerous.
- [78:03]
Brian McCullough
And can I tell you, I've been reading a lot lately about ocean exploration and sort of like the exploration of, you think of Shackleton and that, freezing in the Arctic and stuff like that. But, but, and we think of the Titanic as this disaster that, oh, a ship went down. But like 50 years before the Titanic, going across an ocean was a risky, maybe like 1 in 5 chance you might not make it thing. And when you go even further back in history to like, you know, the 1500s or the 1400s, all the time ships would just go out and you'd never hear from them again. So think of how many times and how many thousands of sailors died exploring on the ocean or just, you know, on a trade ship and there's a storm or something that happens and that was just accepted as, this is, like you said, part of human, this is a dangerous human endeavor. And this is, these are the risks.
- [79:04]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah. And the, and just sort of the inherent complexity of this whole project like that you would have a failure in a small part seems, seems like not that surprising. And in fact, you know, and then the, there was another, there was another space shuttle that crashed for the heat tile reasons, which is also the thing that they had been worried about.
- [79:30]
Brian McCullough
I came away from this book thinking it made me feel like there could have been four or five more accidents. Like.
- [79:38]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah, it's surprising that they weren't that.
- [79:40]
Brian McCullough
Yeah, maybe two was as good as the luck could be, you know.
- [79:45]
Farhad Manjoo
Yeah.
- [79:49]
Brian McCullough
Final question on this. How much of this, when you were reading this, were you thinking of it through the lens of SpaceX now, where I'm not saying that NASA doesn't exist, but essentially what this shuttle program was, was NASA on its own. All they were really doing was launching satellites and doing science experiments. And that's essentially, I'm not being reductive here, NASA still does, you know, stuff with rockets and things like that. But now NASA is we're the people that do the science in space and every and the getting into space. SpaceX and other contractors and private are. They're the ones that are in charge of that.
- [80:29]
Farhad Manjoo
Are you asking like, did you find.
- [80:32]
Brian McCullough
Yourself, do you think that this is maybe the better model where don't try to do everything because you're saying it's this complex thing, break it up into we're the people that do the rockets and we're the people that do the science and that sort of thing.
- [80:55]
Farhad Manjoo
I don't know. I don't know if SpaceX is doing anything like nearly as complicated as the space shuttle. So it's kind of hard to say. The, what I thought was interesting is like to the extent that I thought about SpaceX and like the private space companies while reading this book, it was, it was mostly as like a way, like it's kind of amazing that the government did this in the 80s and like 50 years later private companies are kind of getting around to it and like SpaceX's biggest rocket is like as large as like the Titan rocket. Right? It's like not, they're not sort of doing something that hadn't been done before. And so I don't know, I got this. A lot of this book sort of sparked a nostalgia for like a previous time when like government got things done. Even though there was this big failure, it seemed like the fact that they built it, the fact that it worked, the fact that they investigated the accidents, it just seemed like a better functioning society.
- [81:57]
Brian McCullough
I think that's a good way to end it because I felt the nostalgia for that too. Feeling like you catch yourself thinking, well, I thought things were better because I was a kid and everything seems to have rose colored glasses for your childhood or something like that. But yeah, you're really underlining something that I felt too when I was reading this. We should say again, for people that want to read this book, it is written by. I'm going to have to edit this part.
- [82:33]
Farhad Manjoo
Adam Higinbotham.
- [82:36]
Brian McCullough
The book was written by Adam Higinbotham. It's called A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. Farhad, would you like to tell us anything? Do you have a book coming out? Where can we find you? These days, if nothing else, I'm basically doing nothing.
- [82:56]
Farhad Manjoo
I took some time off and. Must be nice. I may be writing a book. I don't know. I been doing some writing for Slate. Mostly I'm just on like I've been reading lots of books and listening to audiobooks and like spending time with my family as they say.
- [83:15]
Brian McCullough
Yeah. So thank you for listening to this episode. If you're watching on YouTube, like and subscribe. If you're listening on whatever your podcast app is, make sure you're following. But more importantly, I don't think I've said this before yet. Rate and review us on Apple podcasts on Spotify, give us five stars. But also write a little review that says hey, this is a great show since we're just launching that helps us get found again. This is rad 80s 90s history as I end every show. Yo Holmes, Smell you later.
- [84:06]
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