Challenger

Higginbotham, who previously untangled the Chernobyl disaster in Midnight in Chernobyl, applies the same forensic patience here to the 1986 Space Shuttle disaster, reconstructing years of internal NASA warnings about O-ring erosion that were normalized and budgeted away rather than acted on. The book resists the tidy villain narrative; it's less about a single bad decision on a cold January morning than about how institutional pressure, schedule slippage, and diffused responsibility let a known risk go unaddressed for years. Richard Feynman's ice-water demonstration for the Rogers Commission gets its due, but the more damning material is the paper trail showing engineers who raised the alarm and were overruled. It's a study of engineering courage failing against organizational momentum.