Adam Higginbotham is the author of ‘Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,’ a narrative account of the first tragedy to mark NASA’s shuttle program.
Higginbotham spoke to the Monitor about the discoveries of his reporting process, his fidelity to the precise science of space exploration and the personal stories of each Challenger crewmember and his interest in the mid-to-late 1980s — a period of time on the cusp of becoming history. He explained his intention to treat “something that had happened only 30 years ago as you would treat events in Victorian England or revolutionary Russia.”
His book, originally released in May of 2024, will be rereleased in paperback on Jan. 27, the day before the 40th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy.
What follows is an edited version of Higginbotham’s conversation with Monitor news editor Rebeca Pereira.
REBECA: We came to write about Christa because we’re Concord residents who work at the Concord Monitor, and she was a Concord person. How did you come to immerse yourself in the Challenger story and invest so deeply in this particular tragedy?
ADAM: You know, I had been fascinated with the space program when I was a kid. And I began my career as a magazine and newspaper writer, so I’ve written about the space program in various different ways over the years, but I’d always wanted to write about NASA.
But also, when I was working on the Chernobyl story, I became gradually aware that there were these commonalities between the Chernobyl accident and the Challenger accident, which were sort of interesting to explore. The reasons that the accidents happened were quite similar. They both shared the fact that there was this concatenation of individual mistakes and miscalculations over more than 10 years, each one of which, on its own, would not have resulted in a terrible accident but that eventually lined up in this kind of deadly way that ultimately resulted in catastrophe.
They were the result of what sociologists call the normalization of deviance. Engineers working on these complex technologies unconsciously, over time, expand their understanding of what they regard as acceptable risk, up to a point where they start considering things that, if you’d approach them at the beginning of a project they would have recognized as being profoundly dangerous, they accept as perfectly reasonable a risk worth taking.
I also recognized that in the years since the Challenger accident, and then subsequently the Columbia accident in 2003, these had really begun to overshadow all of the amazing achievements of the shuttle program in the years between 1981, when the first launch took place, and ’86 when the first accident took place. People, particularly generations of people who weren’t around at the time, had forgotten what an amazing achievement it was to get the shuttle into space in the first place and all the fantastic things that had happened in those years, like Bruce McCandless becoming the first untethered human satellite in orbit.
REBECA: An example that illustrates what you’re saying — Rachel [Wachman] and I wouldn’t have known otherwise, but at the time, space shuttles could not launch and land in the same place. They would launch and land in the ocean. That was not self-evident.
ADAM: If you look back at that period of the first half of the 1980s, the shuttle was really a symbol of American dominance, both culturally and technologically in the world. There’s this web project that has just gone up that gives you access to all of the videos ever shown on MTV from the beginning to the end, and you can see that one of the first images that was broadcast on MTV was of the shuttle launching. Back at that time, the shuttle was on posters, on t-shirts — before the accident, the shuttle was a symbol of technological brilliance. Before the image from January 28, 1986, of the shuttle disintegrating became embedded in the cultural memory, the shuttle itself, successfully flying, was similarly part of the national consciousness.
REBECA: And it became so pervasive a symbol that it wound up on MTV. You sought to bring the story of each Challenger crewmember to the awareness of your audience, their accomplishments, who they were prior to the launch. Over the course of your research, who did you come to understand the crewmembers to be as people?
ADAM: Each of them have these sort of amazing stories. Ronald McNair is the example that I usually turn to, because he’s someone — I’ve always just been bewildered why he doesn’t have a biography dedicated just to him. He overcame so many hurdles in order to become an astronaut. He grew up in a segregated town in South Carolina, in circumstances where he and his older brother used to pick cotton when school was out in order to make extra money.
And yet, he went on to graduate with a doctorate in laser physics from MIT. He became a black belt in karate and ended up running a program where he would teach kids in Houston to learn karate in the months running up to the Challenger launch. He was an accomplished jazz saxophonist, and he ended up working with the French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre, who was going to and ultimately did stage this massive concert in Houston.
He and Ron had this plan that McNair was going to take a saxophone into space, and Jean Michel Jarre had written a piece of music specifically for McNair to play and rehearsed it with him over the phone in the months leading up to the Challenger launch. The idea was that Ron was then going to play this piece of music live from orbit during the course of this concert that Jarre was putting on in Houston. It turned out not to be possible, but because of timing and ultimately because Dick Scobee, the mission commander, refused McNair permission to take the saxophone into space, but McNair was just this kind of extraordinary person who was kind of not only amazingly accomplished in all of these different fields but also filled with enthusiasm and excitement about about the mission of space exploration and of teaching people.
REBECA: It’s hard not to notice your enthusiasm when you talk about this story. At this point in your career, where you’ve authored two books that dissect historical events that, like you said, were on the cusp of becoming history – and that I think through your work, have become calcified as a part of history — would you characterize yourself as a historian or as a journalist, or a little bit of both?
ADAM: Well, thank you. I can’t remember even how long ago it was, but look, whenever I graduated from college, I studied history. I have a degree in history, but I never really thought of myself as a historian. I still think of myself as a journalist and a writer. If I feel like I want to take myself really seriously, I would probably describe myself as a historian. But I hesitate to describe myself that way, partly because it’s something that’s just the very recent past. It’s so close at hand. There are increasingly fewer people around from that time that you can talk to, but because I lived through it, it doesn’t seem like history to me.
I should say that one of the most fascinating parts of reporting the book was to come across people who’d never been interviewed before. And there were people who said, “I would not have talked about this at the time, but I’m really glad that you were doing this now,” because at a certain point you become aware that if you don’t tell somebody, then your experience and your memories and your view of what happened is just going to be lost.
REBECA: Can you give examples of people you interviewed who hadn’t been interviewed before, or information that you hadn’t come across before, even with the wealth of reporting that’s been out there for decades, that you discovered through your reporting?
ADAM: I knew when I began outlining what I thought the story would be, that I wanted to make one of the principal protagonists of the story one of the engineers at Morton Thiokol who had tried to stop the launch taking place in the first place, the night before the accident. It’s a complicated technical story that is literally rocket science, so I knew that I wanted to have a human being through whom I could tell that story so it wasn’t this dry, technical narrative that people wouldn’t be able to engage with.
The one person I was particularly interested in was Roger Boisjoly, because he was such an extraordinary character and a kind of an oddball. But I began work on the project in 2020, and Boisjoly had died in 2012, so I knew there was no way I was going to be sitting there talking to him, and there wasn’t really that much information out there about him. I was delayed getting into the federal archives because of COVID-19, so it wasn’t until quite late in the process that I managed to get into the National Air and Space Museum archive in Chantilly, Virginia.
I went looking for something completely different, but there wasn’t really very much there. I was halfway through the second day I’d scheduled to spend in that archive, and I just thought, “Well, this is it, I’m done.” And then with Robert Caro’s dictum about “Turn every page,” you know, it was like, well, “There’s another half-box of stuff here.” Right at the end of the second box, there was a padded envelope that had a plastic jewel case, a covering letter, and there was this CD. I went over and looked at it and started to scroll down this document — it was a 600 page memoir that Boisjoly had written before he died but had never been published, and it covered his entire career. He kept every document that passed across his desk at Morton Thiokol. He had kept an engineering diary. There was a day-by-day notebook of everything he did and the phone calls he made. He’d written this memoir that provided me with a way of narrating this whole story.
More about the author: Adam Higginbotham is a British-American writer born in England in 1968. His first book, “Midnight in Chernobyl,” was published in 2019. The winner of the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Colby Award for Military and Intelligence History, “Midnight in Chernobyl” was named one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2019 and became an international bestseller translated into 22 languages.
His second book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” was published in May 2024. A New York Times bestseller, “Challenger” won the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. The book was a finalist for the 2025 Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction.
Higginbotham’s work has appeared in newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, Wired, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine.
A former U.S. correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and editor-in-chief of The Face, he lives with his family in New York City.