The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA’s Challenger Disaster

Journalist Cook (Ten Innings at Wrigley) delivers a crisp account of the January 1986 Challenger disaster focused on Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher selected to join a space mission. The “Teacher in Space” program, according to Cook, aimed to revive public interest in the space program and help President Reagan win teachers’ votes in the 1984 election. McAuliffe, a high school social studies instructor in New Hampshire, was picked from more than 11,000 applicants. She participated in a series of high-profile media interviews and spent four months training for the flight with six other crew members, who are also profiled in detail. Tasked with conducting science lessons from space that PBS “would beam to classrooms all over the country,” McAuliffe struggled to retain the necessary information (it wasn’t her field), but kept at it, determined to prove she was more than a publicity stunt. Cook ramps up tension with well-selected vignettes of final preparations for the launch, and lucidly describes the cause of the explosion (a faulty seal in a rocket booster), the subsequent investigations, and the lawsuits filed by surviving family members. But the brisk pace comes at the expense of a deeper portrayal of McAuliffe and her NASA experiences. Still, this is an informative overview of a preventable tragedy that looms large in the history of the space program. Illus. (June)