No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time - Hardcover

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Danish

After the space shuttle disaster in 1986, the most galling aspect in the matter was the low tech cause: cold rubber rings. Here was hubris at its most naked, and Jensen, a Danish literature teacher whose style rests on detachment and understatement, dramatizes the political, technical, and bureaucratic legacies that exploded at "T plus 73 seconds." Broadly, this is a riveting echo of The Right Stuff but shorn of Wolfe's entertaining though overheated bombast about heroism. Jensen skirts across the Space Age, up through Apollo, and then concentrates on how the Challenger came to be. What we have is not the design NASA wanted. The solid fuel rockets that caused the accident were a typical compromise between space-budgeting politics and engineering optima. The critical link in the decision chain was the rocket contractor's change of mind, at NASA's behest, in favor of launching in cold weather. But that pressure had antecedents that conditioned people to ever narrower safety margins, so that the once insanely dangerous eventually looked like normal risk. Jensen's story is not about hardware; it's about "software," the people responsible for launching the Challenger that day, and the seven people riding it, including schoolteacher McAuliffe. Their lives at the collision point between technology and human foible compel this narrative into page-turning status, which ought to induct it into the club of best-written general narratives about the space program. Gilbert Taylor