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Title: Prescription for Disaster by Trento ISBN: 0-245-54615-4 Publisher: Virgin Books Format: Paperback

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: What are We to Make of the "Challenger" Accident?
Comment: Certainly Joseph J. Trento and Susan B. Trento will tell us in "Prescription for Disaster," and it won't be pretty for NASA. Not truly an investigation of the "Challenger" accident, its authors conducted an in-depth review of the NASA management and research and development system emphasizing the agency's putative "fall from grace" after the Apollo program. They argue that the giants of the 1960s, the people who had successfully managed the lunar program, were gone and had been replaced with government bureaucrats who played the political game and sold the Space Shuttle as an inexpensive program, in the process sowing the seeds of disaster.

The Trentos blame the Nixon Administration for politicizing and militarizing the space program. Every NASA administrator since that time, they said, has had to play hard, but against bigger opponents, in both arenas. They argue that the "Challenger" failure was not caused by the O-rings that allowed the explosion of the spacecraft, but by the political system that produced them.

To the credit of the authors, this book is well referenced, and most of the material for it came from attributed interviews with key officials, although there is some question about how the materials were used to support the Trentos' thesis. The themes presented in "Prescription for Disaster" require continued scholarly analysis by anyone wishing to understand the Space Shuttle program.

Of course, this book is essentially an expose of NASA and the Space Shuttle program, as one would expect in the aftermath of the "Challenger" accident. For a scholarly analysis, and one that is much more effective and compelling, readers should review Diane Vaughan's "The Challenger Launch Decision" (University of Chicago Press, 1996). "Prescription for Disaster" has been far superceded by that book. It is useful mostly for its discussion of the politics of NASA and the White House in 1986, and its overarching perspective on what the public thought about the accident.