Flight Recorder

It seems like a new trend on Netflix is the "four-part documentary mini-series." The Netflix algorithm has pushed a few on me recently, and while I have no shortage of things to watch, the "it's only four hours" appeal has led me to try a couple. The first of these was Challenger: The Final Flight.

This examination of the 1986 Space Shuttle disaster is likely made for a younger audience than me, who doesn't have memories of the actual events. But my interest in all things "space travel" made me want to check out the series even though I didn't necessarily expect it to tell me much I didn't know. Ultimately, it did tell me enough I didn't know that I was quite glad I watched. (It would be hard to say I "enjoyed" it, though, given the tragic subject matter.)

One thing I quite appreciated about the series is the wider focus it took with the Challenger's entire crew. So much of the coverage at the time revolved around Christa McAuliffe, the "teacher in space" whose presence on the mission drew attention even before the tragedy. (She's the reason a good number of people my age -- then in elementary school -- watched the ill-fated launch live.) This documentary series does of course spend time on McAuliffe... but it also spends time on Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, and Greg Jarvis too. Each had their own story, left behind their own grieving family, and gets their due in this retelling of the story.

The documentary gets a number of people on the record that you might not have expected to hear from. Family members with enough time and distance from their loss appear on camera to talk about their loved ones. Engineers responsible for what happened, now retired and not needing to protect a career or reputation, are remarkably frank in discussing the events. (One unrepentant decision maker makes quite the impression when he insists that he'd do nothing differently if he had it to do over again.)

As far as "telling me something I didn't know," the documentary really reveals just how avoidable the disaster truly was. A perfectly good launch window had been scrubbed just two days earlier... and had the Shuttle launched then, there is every reason to think it would have done so successfully. But it's not only in hindsight that the outcome might have been different; the documentary stresses how the Shuttle boosters' notorious O-ring problem was actually well-known even before the flight, more so even than I'd realized. And if you thought that Christa McAuliffe would have been the first "civilian" in space, you thought wrong. As a political ploy to boost NASA funding, members of Congress had flown on the Shuttle before this... one even bumping a previously assigned astronaut to the disastrous Challenger flight itself.

I found Challenger: The Final Flight to be a sensitive, informative, and well put together documentary. I give it an A-. Sure, the subject matter all but ensured I was going to be fascinated... but many of my readers have the same interests, and I think they'll appreciate the series too.