Having been suffering an occasional bout of insomnia, I was reluctantly awake early on the morning of February 1st, 2003, when Columbia, one of NASA's four space shuttles, broke up upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. I was four years old when Challenger met an equally horrific fate. And so, watching Columbia's end play out on CNN, I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. Even if the cause of the disaster wasn't immediately clear, its ramifications were.
This spectacular catastrophe, occurring in an era of 24/7 media saturation, would have dire consequences for not only the shuttle program but NASA itself. Mr. Jones, a writer and editor at Esquire, captures Columbia's last flight, its mechanics and its fallout for the American space program. But while his book does credit to these weighty issues, it is inarguably at its best as it chronicles the harrowing return to Earth for the astronauts who, as a consequence of NASA grounding the shuttle fleet in the wake of the disaster, were stranded on the International Space Station. NASA's parallel efforts to bring the astronauts home, ultimately with Russian aid, and to discover the fatal flaw that provoked Columbia's doom is woven nicely into the broader public-relations implications of the disaster. Politically and philosophically, Columbia changed NASA's behavior, igniting a conversation about not only manned exploration of space but the cost-benefit analysis of that exploration using shuttles that were then 25 years old.
This is a tale with many players, almost all of whom equivocate as a result of what they have to lose politically, fiscally or socially. Mr. Jones does a credible if unspectacular job with the broader picture. Where he excels is with the stranded astronauts who remained on the ISS far longer than planned and returned home in what was, to say the least, the most unorthodox of ways. This is good work and it tells a story worth telling. (3/5 Stars)
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