Goodreads Review - "Challenger: A True Story of Heroism & Disaster on the Edge of Space"

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The history behind NASA and space exploration is one of my favorite subjects to read about or watch a documentary of. I’ve seen the “Challenger: The Final Flight” documentary on Netflix at least four times. This book was released after that documentary and includes most of the info from it; however, it also provides even more details. Adam Higginbotham has delivered us with an extensively researched and well written story of what really happened.

This disaster should have never happened. It wasn’t an accident and I refuse to ever call it that. This was prideful negligence on the part of NASA leaders who strong-armed others to agree with them to continue the launch despite the recommendations not to. You would think that NASA would have learned their lesson after the Apollo 1 fatal fire. They didn’t. They allowed their hubris to take front and center stage.

We owe a lot to Al McDonald and his bravery for standing up & speaking the truth at the Rogers Commission of what really happened the night before in a meeting between NASA and Thiokol. It’s even more disturbing that NASA officials didn’t inform the astronauts of the risk of launching that morning. General Donald Kutyna said to Larry Mallory during the hearings, “Larry, if this were an airplane, an airliner, and I just had a two-hour argument with Boeing on whether the wing was going to fall off or not, I think I would tell the pilot.”

Dr. Judy Resnik’s last words were hauntingly beautiful. Before she entered the front cabin, she looked at Christa McAuliffe and said, “The next time I see you, we’ll be in space.”

The last part of President Reagan’s address to the nation (which includes a couple lines from the poem “High Flight”): “The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

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Goodreads Review - "Poems & Prayers"

Poems & Prayers by Matthew McConaughey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed reading this book of poems & prayers and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves poetry. I saved a few poems and quotes and this one was my favorite:

"The American dream is a promise for the opportunity to at least fail, and possibly succeed. Seems like the path to this dream is more undefined now than it's ever been. To those among us who don't believe in it and say, "It's not real," I say to you: "At least America's still trying." That's simply not true in so many other countries. So, whether you think it's a dream or an illusion, if nothing else, it's the best nightmare available.

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