Review from Writers House, Frankfurt
February 15, 2007
Challenger Revealed is the mind blowing story of one of the greatest
unsolved mysteries of our time. Richard Cook, then an insider at NASA, reveals
information about the shuttle program that no outside author has been able
to obtain. He himself was a participant in behind the scenes meetings which
to this day have never been reported on. The book’s startling conclusion
is that it was the militarization of the shuttle, a violation of law, that
was the underlying cause of the Challenger catastrophe. Written as a chronological
narrative, the book is also packed with the high drama of a novel. It was
Cook who wrote the memo warning that the defective O-rings could lead to catastrophe.
After the awful explosion and once he saw that the Reagan administration was
going for a cover up, he became the quaking and terrified whistle blower who
went to the Washington bureau of the New York Times, hoping against
hope that his name would not be used, fearing awful reprisals. Unique in this
book is the history of how the Reagan White House, in collusion with NASA’s
acting administrator William Graham, used the Teacher In Space Program as
a cover for plans to convert the shuttle into a testing platform for Strategic
Defense Initiative space weapons using laser and particle beams. Also disclosed
is how Graham manipulated the Challenger’s launch schedule to assure
that Challenger would prop up President Reagan’s State of the Union
address.
Richard Cook in 1986 was the lead resource analyst at NASA for the space shuttle
solid rocket boosters. One of the foremost whistle-blowers of all time, it
was his disclosures which paved the way for shocking revelations by engineers
at Morton Thiokol, the rocket’s manufacturer. He has published articles
in the Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Space and
Security News and the Houston Press.