Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

The tenth and last flight of Space Shuttle Challenger lasted only 73 seconds; to tell the full history of those terrible moments, Adam Higginbotham requires, justifiably, over five hundred pages and more than three decades of backstory. After his acclaimed Midnight in Chernobyl, Higginbotham has become our laureate of engineering disasters, but this story is also about success, about the awesomely complicated scientific and political project of putting the "most complicated machine in history" into space, as much as it's about the hubris, cowardice, and expedience that led to the disaster. A very human story about the limits of human ambition.