January 30, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Cultural Representations

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On telling examples of three forms of media’s depictions of the Challenger.

1)      TV Movies: The live broadcast of the Challenger launch (and thus the explosion) that I discussed at length in Wednesday’s post was without question one of the most gripping TV-watching experiences of all time for those of us who were in that audience. So it stands to reason that TV would lead the way in depicting those events through subsequent works. The quickest to production, and to this day the most controversial, was the ABC TV movie Challenger (1990), which starred Karen Allen as Christa McAuliffe and was criticized as inaccurate by multiple astronauts’ family members. But equally interesting was the much later BBC film The Challenger Disaster (2013), which focused on Richard Feynman’s (played by the great William Hurt) controversial role in the Rogers Commission investigation and report that I highlighted in yesterday’s post.

2)      TV Shows: Those kinds of long-form TV films have been a principal vehicle through which the medium has depicted the Challenger, but it also has made its way into individual shows and episodes in interesting ways over the last decade or so. More exactly, both the drama This Is Us and the sitcom Mixed-ish have used entire episodes focused on the explosion as a way to develop character relationships and identities: This Is Us with a Season 6 flashback to the explosion as part of its ongoing portrayal of Jack and Rebecca Pearson’s youthful marriage and family; and Mixed-Ish, which was a prequel to the show Black-ish and thus was set in the 1980s, with its first-season episode “When Doves Cry” about the whole family’s reactions to the tragedy. Both of those episodes suggest that by the 2010s, the explosion had become shorthand for how historic tragedies can affect individuals, much like the Kennedy assassination has been for Baby Boomers.

3)      Memoirs: As you would expect, there have been plenty of books published about the Challenger over these last four decades, from first-hand journalism to scholarly analyses. But I’m particularly interested in a pair of memoirs through which individuals directly connected to the explosion and especially its investigations sought to advance their own case for what happened. Very soon after the explosion, Feynman published his second autobiographical book, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character (1988), which devoted roughly half its length to discussing the Rogers Commission. A couple decades later, NASA engineer Allan McDonald published (with co-author James Hansen) his book Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (2009), which highlights his and others’ pre-launch concerns and criticizing NASA for going forward with the mission. Memoir is always a complex and often a strikingly self-serving genre, but these books really drive home such fraught motivations for life writing.

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?