Best laid plans …
My holds came in on Challenger and Intermezzo, so I‘m bumping them ahead of my bookspin picks and reading them next.
pickThis was an emotional read for me! I was in 4th grade in Florida when it happened. My class stepped outside to watch so I saw the explosion live in the sky. And in hindsight there were so many reasons to not launch that day 😔 The story was well told by the author.
By the time the design was complete...engineers... still believed they were employing a tried-and-tested joint for their new rocket: they had avoided any potentially dangerous innovation. But this was a convenient delusion.... in creating a man-rated, fail-safe joint they had also modified it so extensively that what they produced was, in effect, a quite new and experimental design.
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Cue the ominous soundtrack...
"Why are you interrupting my bird watching?"
Current library reads with one I just completed (The Mighty Red).
Day 11 of #12Booksof2024 is my favorite nonfiction read of the year
@Andrew65
My October pick for #12BooksOf2024 is Apollo 13, by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. A fascinating, suspenseful read. I was inspired to watch the movie as well, and that was also great.
....the exercises [water survival drills] were conducted under the gaze of dozens of reporters and cameramen...
By now, each of the women understood that the novelty of being America's first female astronauts made them a focus of attention, but their patience was already fraying....
when, as she was being winched aloft by a helicopter, a photographer asked Sally Ride to make a "happy face" for the cameras, she simply yelled, "No!"
CHALLENGER is riveting. Wrenching. Heartbreaking. And brilliant.
A special plane nicknamed the Vomit Comet will take you high in the sky and then ZOOM back down.
