Challenger : A Major Malfunction : A True Story of Politics, Greed, and the Wrong Stuff - Hardcover

Malcolm McConnell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385238770 ISBN 13: 9780385238779

Publisher: Doubleday, 1986

Synopsis

Recounts the Challenger tragedy, describes how politics has influenced the space program, and reexamines the decision to launch

About this title

From Library Journal:

The rush to publish first-anniversary accounts of the Challenger disaster has produced two books that would have profited from more careful editing. Both examine the now familiar administrative shortcomings that placed launch schedule pressures ahead of flight safety. Trento takes the long view, examining NASA's management from its inception, the glory days of Apollo, and finally the shuttle era, when, in his view, politics overwhelmed sound engineering judgment. He makes good use of interviews with every past NASA administrator as well as with Apollo and Shuttle managers to detail the administrative drift and budgetary pressures that allowed political considerations to gain ascendancy in staffing the agency and, more importantly, in making program and technological decisions. Unfortunately factual errors regarding program names, technical details, dates, and misspelled names mar his account. McConnell focuses more on the particulars of the doomed mission. In New Journalism style, he attempts to reconstruct the details of the decision to launch. He draws heavily on Rogers Commission testimony for much of his narrative. However, some undocumented assertions (e.g., that tensions existed among the Challenger crew because the non-pilots were brought into the program for "political considerations" demand substantiation. The two accounts share complementary flawsTrento's access to first-hand sources is countered by factual inaccuracies; McConnell's detailed reconstruction of events and conversations, in addition to the insinuations of irregularities in Shuttle contract awards, lack proper documentation. Neither book provides the last word on the disaster; however, of the two, Trento's political examination of NASA's decline makes it the better choice. Thomas J. Frieling, Bainbridge Junior Coll. Lib., Ga.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0385238770
• ISBN 13: 9780385238779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 269