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It’s not as inspiring as John F. Kennedy’s “because it is hard” or Neil Armstrong’s “one small step,” but in the last few years officials at NASA have routinely repeated a phrase as if it were a sacred incantation: “We won’t fly until we’re ready.” It seems a banal, obvious statement, fit for federal bureaucrats spouting the company line. But it carries the weight of profound admonition, a reminder to themselves as much as anyone that they won’t rush a launch and risk astronauts’ lives.

It’s a promise that they won’t make the same mistakes as in the past.

The leaders of NASA today are the heirs to a space agency far different from the one that launched heroes like Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong at the swashbuckling dawn of the Space Age. Today’s NASA bears the scars of tragedy — a series of calamities and near misses that have molded the agency as much as the giant leaps it has taken. And no tragedy is more indelible than the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

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“Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” by Adam Higginbotham, is a superb diagnosis of one of NASA’s darkest moments, the mission that ended in an explosion 73 seconds into flight on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members on board.

It is a compelling and exhaustively researched chronicle of the calamity that traces its full arc — the evolution of the enabling culture that allowed it, the terrible day itself and its enduring legacy. Revisiting the history of the Challenger explosion, however, is a daunting task. Even non-space-enthusiasts know the story, and how it ends. That horrible orange-and-black explosion set against the blue Florida sky is etched on the national consciousness like the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11.

We know how NASA, overconfident and brash, rushed ahead with the flight over the warnings of engineers who feared the cold weather’s effect on the “O-ring seals” in the rocket’s side-mounted solid rocket boosters. We know Christa McAuliffe, the bright-eyed social studies teacher from Concord, N.H., who perished alongside the six NASA astronauts, bringing to a halt the agency’s attempt to fly ordinary citizens to space. We know that despite the many investigations the accident spawned and NASA’s vow to instill a better safety culture, the agency would once again face tragedy years later, when space shuttle Columbia came apart in 2003, killing another crew of seven.

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And yet in the hands of Higginbotham, a British-born journalist and the author of the acclaimed “Midnight in Chernobyl,” the narrative comes to life in a fresh telling fueled by meticulous detail and exacting prose. While familiar, the story is rendered dreamlike so that readers can’t help but hope, as it unfolds page by page, that somehow the outcome this time will be different.

Higginbotham starts his tale not with the shuttle program but in an earlier era, when NASA was in its infancy and suffered its first major catastrophe — in 1967, with the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White. The trio were killed not in space but during a test at Cape Canaveral, when their capsule, full of pure oxygen, caught fire and there was no way for them to open the hatch from the inside. While an investigation “revealed shocking incompetence,” as Higginbotham writes, it did not derail the Apollo program.

As triumphant as it was — 12 Americans walking on the surface of the moon in a series of daring missions — spaceflight remained as dangerous as ever, even if by the last of the Apollo missions, in 1972, the country had grown bored of it. As Higginbotham writes, “However routine it began to seem for the American public, the architects of Apollo knew that spaceflight had always been experimental, and sending men so far, into such a hostile environment, with so many opportunities for failure, was fraught with lethal hazards.”

Those hazards, however, seemed to be forgotten by the time the shuttle was born — at least forgotten by NASA leadership, which, high on the triumph of Apollo, was wildly promoting its new winged vehicle as a revolution in design that would fly so often that even ordinary citizens would be invited to take trips to space. By the time McAuliffe was selected from an applicant pool that topped 11,000, NASA was already gearing up to later fly a journalist — Walter Cronkite was considered a favorite — and then, possibly, an artist.

But as Higginbotham deftly chronicles, the hype emerging from NASA’s publicity machine was not matched by the realities of the severe mechanical problems that engineers wrestled with after each of the shuttle’s flights. The problems weren’t limited to the faulty O-ring seals. Another was the culture at NASA, where leaders were eager to hit the flight rate they had promised the public and to deliver on a program that was suffering from significant cost overruns and delays.

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Instead of standing down, the agency pushed ahead. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the NASA contractor responsible for the solid rocket boosters, warned of concerns with the O-ring seals. One NASA leader barked at them, in one of Higginbotham’s more harrowing scenes: “My God, Thiokol. When do you expect me to launch — next April?”

The astronauts, however, knew what they were getting into. Higginbotham recalls a moment when Challenger astronaut Judy Resnik completed her will leading up to the launch, saying, over the reassurances of a friend that one would not be needed, “I know what’s involved.”

The loss of the shuttle was, as Higginbotham writes, “a national bereavement unlike any event since the assassination of John Kennedy more than twenty years before.” And like a prosecutor making his closing argument in the case, Higginbotham renders his verdict forcefully and convincingly:

“An organization that had, since its inception, boasted of its ability to manage extraordinary risk on the frontiers of technology and learn from its mistakes had instead overlooked a litany of clear warnings: the signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture bred by repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible. Seduced by their own mythos, and blind to the subtleties of engineering complexity that none of them fully understood, the nation’s smartest minds had unwittingly sent seven men and women to their deaths.”

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One can hope that NASA today has learned the lessons from Challenger and that “we’ll launch when we’re ready” is an inviolable doctrine. Still, danger lingers, as it did then. The risk of human spaceflight remains very real. To reach orbital velocity — some 17,500 mph — large amounts of highly combustible propellants ignite at high pressure with the force of a bomb. As Michael Collins, an Apollo 11 astronaut, once wrote, “A thin and fragile barrier separates combustion from explosion.”

Instead of flying crews to the International Space Station on its own, NASA now relies on contractors, SpaceX and Boeing. While SpaceX has flown all its crewed missions successfully, two of its Falcon 9 rockets have exploded, one in 2015, the other a year later. Then in 2019, one of its Dragon capsules blew up during a test on the ground. That same year, Boeing’s first test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, which had no people on board, was such a debacle that the company almost lost the capsule twice during the mission. Thankfully, no one was hurt in any of those failures.

SpaceX, which has been flying people to orbit for four years, holds what it calls “paranoia reviews” ahead of each launch. The company puts the faces of astronauts on work orders to remind the engineers that lives depend on them.

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The echoes of Challenger reverberate today, but even NASA’s best engineers don’t always know where problems are buried or when they might reveal themselves. That’s why the agency talks about “managing risk,” because risk is a beast it cannot fully control. And the risk NASA has deemed acceptable — the calculation it has written into the contracts with SpaceX and Boeing — is that the chance of a catastrophic event can be no greater than 1 in 270. When it comes to spaceflight now, those are about the best odds you can get.

Challenger

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

By Adam Higginbotham

Avid Reader. 561 pp. $35

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