Adam Higginbotham

that although individual engineers over the years brought to their superiors' attention the fact that there were problems and these problems could be serious and needed to be addressed, no really serious effort to do that had started until it was too late.

they found that there were appalling failures of communication in the run-up to the launch, that although these individual engineers at Morton Thiokol had clearly flagged their concerns and said, you know, we're worried there's going to be catastrophe, these reports had never been passed up the launch decision chain.

So the most senior NASA managers at Cape Canaveral on the day of the launch never got to hear about this.

Well, she was intended to be the first citizen astronaut.

So the whole idea of it was that this was making spaceflight accessible to just people like you and me, regular people who, once you'd been told how to use the escape hatch and the space toilet, then your instruction was at an end.

So they organized this program to interview candidates

to be the first civilian in space, the first teacher in space.

And Krista McAuliffe was selected from around 11,000 applicants from all across the United States.

And she proved to be just a fantastic candidate for this.

She was extremely charismatic.

She was a fantastic communicator and a really gifted educator who can communicate the ideas inherent in spaceflight to an audience of children and to adults extremely clearly.

Well, the accident investigation after the loss of Columbia concluded that, you know, what lessons had been learned after the Challenger accident had been forgotten or never successfully learned in the first place because the Columbia accident happened for extremely similar reasons to the reasons that led to the Challenger disaster.

Yes.

Yes, it did.

Well, I mean, one of the reasons that I wanted to write the book was because I realized when I began reading more deeply about what had happened,

that those two accidents, the Challenger accident and the Columbia accident, have come to overshadow the story of the shuttle program.

I mean, quite understandably, but in such a way that people now don't really realize what an amazing achievement it was, not merely to get the space shuttle into orbit in the first place in 1981, but

But then to do all the amazing things they did with it in the years before Challenger and then once it began returning to flight in the years before the Columbia accident.

But it's the image, I think, that's really seared into people's minds is that of the disintegration of Challenger.

And that supplanted the way in which people thought of the shuttle program as just a symbol of people's confidence in the promise of technology in the future.