Pod Insights American Scandal Challenger Disaster | Revisiting the Tragedy | 5 About this episode Like most people who were alive in 1986, filmmaker Steven Leckart remembers the Challenger disaster. He was a kid in elementary school at the time. But as an adult, Leckart set out to explore the aftermath of what happened through interviews with astronauts’ family members, engineers and NASA officials. Today, Leckart joins Lindsay to talk about the 2020 Netflix series, Challenger: The Final Flight, which he co-directed and produced.
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0:00 Lindsay Graham? Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
0:21 Lindsay Graham? From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.
0:44 Lindsay Graham? If you attended a K-12 school in America in January of 1986, there's a good chance you watched the launch of the space shuttle Challenger from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on TV. All around the country, televisions were wheeled into classrooms to broadcast a historic milestone: the first American civilian traveling into space, schoolteacher Krista McAuliffe. You might have watched as McAuliffe and her six fellow astronauts waved and smiled confidently at the cameras on their way to the launch pad. And maybe you felt a sense of awe and wonder as the rockets roared to life and the shuttle took off, soaring into the skies for just over a minute, until something went horribly wrong. Filmmaker Stephen Leckart remembers that day well and set out to explore the aftermath of the Challenger disaster.
1:29 Lindsay Graham? He co-directed, co-created, and produced the 2020 Netflix series Challenger: The Final Flight. Our conversation is next.
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2:31 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Sachi Cole, co-host of Scamfluencers from Audible Originals. Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes let a film crew see everything before she went to prison, or at least that's what she wanted them to think. In our latest episode, we dig into the documentary that has everyone asking, who's really running the con? Listen to Scamfluencers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.
3:02 Lindsay Graham? Stephen Leckhart, thanks for speaking with me today on American Scandal.
3:06 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
3:07 Lindsay Graham? Now, there are only a few moments in everyone's lifetime. I can remember probably two or three, and the most recent was September 11th, 2001. But moments where you know exactly where you were when you found out. The other moment I distinctly remember is the Challenger accident, January 28th, 1986. I was in sixth grade, and we were being sent home from school because there was no water pressure. Already a weird day, and then there was this rippling rumor of something horrible happening. We all found out when we got home and watched TV. What do you remember, if anything, about that day?
3:41 Speaker 03 I was in elementary school, and I remember all the excitement around the launch leading up to it because of Krista McAuliffe being a teacher. And I remember the TV in the classroom, and I'm young elementary school, so it was exciting, but the details are somewhat fuzzy. Mostly, I remember something happening. I remember the teacher turning the television off, and I remember being told to go outside and play. And then I was confused. I seemed to feel like we understood that something terrible had happened, that people had died. And it, in that sense, it was my first experience of death. I had not lost a family member.
4:22 Speaker 03 I'd watched movies and television shows with people who died, but those were actors and it was fake. And this was very real. But I was so young that no one really talked to us about it because it was confusing. And I remember going home and I seem to remember it being on the TV, on the news. But I don't remember talking to anyone about it. I just remember my excitement for space and wanting to be an astronaut. Feeling now really complicated and not wanting to be an astronaut anymore.
4:52 Lindsay Graham? Your Netflix series begins with a shot of a recreation of a classroom at that moment. You see the back of kids' heads watching the Challenger launch on TV. Is this a mirror of your memory? What were you trying to say by starting your series like that?
5:06 Speaker 03 It was a mirror of everyone's memories, if you were alive. I wanted to remember that kids were watching and I was, of course, one of them. But that if we could see the series through fresh eyes like a child and always keep that in perspective, it would be useful. And sort of explain things in a way that when I was younger, I didn't get. So we really felt that it would be kind of beautiful to start in a classroom and to track in towards the television and to create more drama as we get pulled into the TV. And then you get lost in the archival. But to start it with a recreated memory, again, it was my memory. It was all of us who were making the project who were alive. We all contributed elements to how we designed the classroom.
5:49 Speaker 03 And in fact, for several of the producers, myself, my co-director, the back of those kids' heads, it's actually our kids.
5:56 Lindsay Graham? That's fascinating. You also remind us too about the lives lost. Each episode in the series begins with the faces of the astronauts. Did you remember yourself, any of the faces or names of the seven astronauts before you started this project?
6:10 Speaker 03 I'm sad to admit I did not know them well. You know, as a kid, I knew Kristen McCullough. That was the name that we learned a lot about. And that was the one that was seared into my brain and into my memory. And it wasn't until doing a lot of research as an adult and coming back around that I started to feel more of a connection to the other names and who they were and just how remarkable they were. There were multiple astronauts who were I guess groundbreakers prior to the Challenger, they were part of the first astronaut class, which included the first black Americans to go to space, included the first women to go to space, the first Jews to go to space, the first Asian American to go to space. When we put two and two together,
6:52 Speaker 03 that multiple people who were part of that historic astronaut class, years later, wound up on the Challenger, it made us think of two things. One, we needed to make sure that you knew every single person who was on the Challenger. And two, we needed to make sure we tied them to that legacy. Because space really was going to be for everybody. And that's what Kristin McCullough stood for, the idea that a civilian, an average person, quote unquote, would be able to go to space. But before that, astronauts were, you know, white male fighter pilots. And that was completely rewritten by the Space Shuttle program.
7:29 Lindsay Graham? Now, of course, also, the seven astronauts, they weren't the only ones whose lives were completely changed and altered in this disaster. NASA and the NASA contractors all felt this horrible disaster deeply. And you spent years making this series, conducting interviews with astronauts, families, former NASA officials, people who worked at Morton Thyacall in particular. I'd like to ask you about your interview with engineer Bob Ebling's daughter, Leslie. What did she tell you about the stresses her dad went through? Both, I guess, before and after the Challenger launched?
8:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, that was a remarkable interview. And Leslie was a remarkable figure because she lived at home with her mom and dad at the time. She also worked at Morton Thyacall. And they used to carpool to work together. So when we met Leslie, it was remarkable because unfortunately, her father had passed away. But she became a proxy for him because she literally rode in the passenger seat with him to work every day. And that meant that she got to see a shift in him. So, you know, when the shuttle first was being developed and when the subcontractors got these jobs, it was exciting. They were contributing to the next big leap for the American space program. There was so much revelry around this ship.
8:45 Speaker 03 It was the most complex machine ever built and everyone took such immense pride. So that's what she saw in her dad was that immense pride. And what started to shift was the moments where they started to sense that there were problems. And I think everyone anticipated there'd be problems because it's the most complex machine that's ever built. Space travels really hard. You know, you're engineering things that are going into the vacuum of space. So they have to be engineered in a much different way than just building a automobile. So you expect those difficulties, but what started to happen to Bob is that, and there's a paper trail that shows this. Some of the concerns weren't necessarily being taken with as much seriousness, at least from their perspective, as it warranted.
9:31 Speaker 03 And over time, that created a sense of stress for him as he would show up to his work. They would try to be fixing things or working on them or troubleshooting. And yet the launches continued. So it really became like a slow motion car crash.
9:46 Lindsay Graham? One of the other interviews was, I guess, a more junior colleague of Bob Eblings at Morton Tycoe, a man named Brian Russell. What was that interview like for you?
9:55 Speaker 03 Well, it was the first one we filmed. We cold called Brian, got on the phone with him. It was a long conversation to finally get him on board to agree to share his story with us. And when we showed up at his house, you know, we show up with a pretty big crew. We shot four cameras. There's a lot of downtime while we're setting up, we're loading in. And so we were chatting and getting to know each other. So by the time he sat in the chair, you know, we'd really spoken for several hours. We could tell that he had a lot of emotions that were clearly at the surface. The night before the launch, there was a phone call, a group phone call. We didn't have Zoom back then.
10:34 Speaker 03 There was a group of people in Utah, you know, a series of high up executives, as well as some of the engineers on the team for the solid rocket booster. And we depict this in recreations in the series. So Brian was in that room with the team in Morton Tycoe. And then in Florida, down at the Cape, there was a trailer with a few NASA engineers and supervisors. And there was a long conversation going back and forth between the two. Should we launch? Should we not launch? Let's look at the data. The data is showing that it's cold. That could be bad. There were previous launches that were colder and everything worked fine. So it's not a clear cut case where the science said specifically that something bad would
11:17 Speaker 03 happen because there was evidence to show that they had done it in worse conditions and nothing bad happened. So back and forth, back and forth. Brian is a young engineer sitting off to the sidelines, listening to everything and he's not in a position to speak up in that room, but he felt they shouldn't launch. At the end of that meeting, what had to happen was Morton Thiokal had to sign off on the launch to say that it was okay. And so they needed to sign a piece of paper from one of the higher ups at Morton Thiokal. They needed a piece of paper sent via fax machine to the Cape saying they approved the launch. And Brian, I'm not even sure why, they handed
11:57 Speaker 03 him the fax and said, go send the fax. And so he became an involuntary messenger in this chain that led to catastrophe. So as the interview progressed, he just got more and more emotional. I think it felt cathartic for him. I couldn't speak to that directly, what it did for him in the moment, but his wife took aside our cinematographer Graham Willoughby and just said, thank you. He's been carrying this for years.
12:25 Lindsay Graham? It's interesting that not everyone has the same emotions in this project. Not everyone was seeking a catharsis. You had an interview with William Lucas, who on the NASA side okayed the Challenger launch. He headed the Marshall Space Flight Center team that oversaw the solid rocket fuel boosters. What did he say about his decision to launch Challenger that morning?
12:45 Speaker 03 I'll be honest, framing his emotions is not something I'm going to be able to do because I, as a documentary filmmaker, you know, you interview people and it's up to the viewer to decide how it makes them feel. I can tell you that during our interview with Bill, he was very proud of all of the work that he had done for decades prior to the shuttle. And his legacy at NASA was one that he felt was not martyr pockmarked by the Challenger. And there were other disasters that we spoke about, you know, one of the very first rockets that was trying to launch in NASA during the Apollo program, it caught fire and killed astronauts.
13:26 Speaker 03 So I think as a scientist, as an engineer, as somebody who had decades of experience at NASA, had watched and lived through other tragedies, I think it was a simple case for him to accept that this endeavour, which is space travel, is just very risky. And as an engineer and as a scientist, he pointed very clearly to the data that showed there were other shuttle missions that had launched in much colder temperatures and they had launched successfully. So the data just were not conclusive one way or the other, despite the concerns of everyone at Morton-Thiakal and potentially even within NASA. So I think
14:09 Speaker 03 for him, Challenger, an unfortunate, terrible tragedy, but not one that could have been prevented in the sense that the data were conclusive. If the data were conclusive, the conversation would have been very different.
14:31 Speaker 04 Alice, have you ever wondered why the Mini is so small?
14:34 Speaker 02 The Skir or the Magnum?
14:37 Speaker 04 Well, I meant the iconic British car, because in 1956, Britain's oil supply was suddenly cut off. Petrol rationing was brought in and the car industry was scrambling around for a vehicle that hardly used any fuel. Enter the Mini.
14:51 Speaker 02 Interesting, but actually not technically British Scandal series material.
14:56 Speaker 04 Well, the reason they had to save petrol is because the Prime Minister started a war and lied about why.
15:01 Speaker 02 Okay, scandal siren going off.
15:04 Speaker 04 I'm Matt Ford.
15:04 Speaker 02 And I'm Alice Levine.
15:06 Speaker 04 And our latest British Scandal series involves a secret meeting in a French villa, a Prime Minister running on amphetamines.
15:11 Speaker 02 An Egyptian president that everyone fancied, the end of the British Empire, and at the heart of it, a canal.
15:18 Speaker 04 This is the story of the Suez Plot.
15:21 Speaker 02 Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on
15:31 Speaker 05 Hey, I'm Cassie DePecce, the host of Against the Odds from Audible Originals. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who lived to tell the tale. In our latest series, we track the story of Hugh Glass, the real-life revenant that inspired the 2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In 1823, Glass was brutally mauled by a grizzly bear in present-day South Dakota and left for dead. His survival depended on trekking through 350 miles of wilderness alone with grave injuries. But he was driven by his thirst for revenge. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Against the Odds early and ad-free right now.
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16:24 Lindsay Graham? In your series, you found some amazing footage and photographs of a place that most people probably haven't seen, but it was somewhere we set a few scenes of our series in: a beach house where astronauts and their families gathered before the launch. Talk about that place and those photos.
16:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, the beach house, it was a dingy little sort of shack, nothing super special, down on the beach in the Cape, on a very, very private, quiet, empty beach that, you know, the public didn't have access to. And long before the space shuttle program, it was used by astronauts and their families to go and have a little bit of a break and a reprieve prior to launches. As we were doing our interviews, we realized, from talking with the astronauts' families, that they were still using it during the space shuttle program. And the description of the place was really intriguing because there were old bottles, champagne bottles, up on the mantle that were turned into candle holders from previous missions.
17:22 Speaker 03 And I didn't know that we would find these photos. I think we hoped. And then as we met the families of the Challenger astronauts, it turned out that there were photographs. And there were photographs of this crew before the launch. It's intimate moments among colleagues and friends and their family members. And the couples all sat together in the living room. And there's beautiful pictures of each couple, you know, seated on a couch, smiling and laughing. And it really set a nice tone for the idea that they were collectively celebrating and having a nice time. But what was beautiful was not photographed, which was the couples all went and spent separate time together. So June Scobie Rogers describes
18:04 Speaker 03 taking a walk on the beach with her husband. And that was a really beautiful idea that, okay, the seven astronauts and their significant others all gathered together. But then even in that private setting, they all found ways to have side conversations with one another and intimate moments, just the two of them.
18:23 Lindsay Graham? There were plenty of these intimate moments, but I don't know many as heart wrenching as perhaps June Scobie Rogers's. And the way she talks about her husband in the series. How does she describe their relationship in those final moments and hauntingly, the moments that came back to her even after the disaster?
18:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, she just is an amazing human being. The way she speaks about the loss, you can't help but feel for her. The way that she also, I think, was a good quote unquote astronauts wife, the way she supported her husband, the way she really took the lead among the family members and the partners, wives and husbands. She really was very much a leader in her own right. And she described after the accident being brought into a building within NASA. And there's kind of a locker room area where all the astronauts would keep their personal effects and belongings. And she takes us through in the series, she
19:20 Speaker 03 describes opening her husband's locker and finding a Valentine's Day card that he had written to her already. And the emotion that she explained to us was very, very real. It felt important because what it said about her husband was that he was planning to come home. There was no plan to not come home despite the risks. And he'd already planned that out that, oh, I'll write my wife a beautiful card because I love her. And those are the moments that as an interviewer and as a producer on the project, you know, it felt very much like we were being led into an incredibly private moment. And I can't speak for June, but I would intuit that what it said about her husband was everything
20:04 Speaker 03 that you can take from the story, which is that he loved her.
20:09 Lindsay Graham? Another of the astronauts family that you interviewed was Lisa Bristol, Krista McAuliffe's sister. What was that interview like?
20:16 Speaker 03 Lisa was the very last interview we conducted for the whole series. From the beginning with a project like this, but many projects, you create a spreadsheet of all the people that you might want to talk to. We knew we had seven astronauts and we needed to find ways to humanize each of them. So we reached out to husbands and wives and children, anyone who was alive at the time. And in the case of Krista, we had reached out to her husband and tried multiple times to contact him. He politely declined, which was not a surprise because we had never found or seen any other interview he'd ever given. But it made us kind of wonder, well, how are we going to get to the heart of Krista?
21:00 Speaker 03 Who knew her before she became an astronaut? Who could speak to her as a human being? And who was potentially there for the launch? And we knew that her sister Lisa was there. And if you see Lisa, they very much look like sisters. We just remember calling Lisa and having a very long conversation about our intent for the series. We had found one interview she had done for a newspaper, so we knew she was comfortable talking about it. But there's a very big difference between giving an interview to a print reporter with a tape recorder and asking to come with four cameras and a crew of people to your house. So she agreed and it was pretty unbelievable. She spoke so beautifully about her sister
21:45 Speaker 03 and who she was. But in the middle of the interview, she got up and said, I'm gonna go get something. And she came back with her own journal at the time of the accident. And she just flipped pages and read her journal out loud to us. This is her private journal that she kept from, you know, 1986. And, you know, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, but just as a human being, to being let into that kind of private, internal monologue for her that she'd put down on paper. That was the moment for me that I felt like we really got to the inside of what it felt like to be Krista's family member. As she flipped pages, it went from all the excitement of the parades and the press attention
22:29 Speaker 03 all the way to launch. And then, of course, she took us through her memories of being on the ground. She was seated with her parents and her parents are no longer with us. And what she provided was just an incredible perspective on the whole event.
22:46 Lindsay Graham? I understand as a result of your film, one of the family members reached out to one of the Thiacal engineers. That was probably a strained relationship. Can you share what happened?
22:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think after getting closer to the inside of the story of the Morton Thiacal piece with the folks who felt strongly that they shouldn't launch, it started to be clear that those folks had not ever really met or talked to any of the Challenger families. And so at some point after the series came out in 2020, I later heard that one of the astronaut member's family members reached out and got in touch with one of the engineers at Morton Thiacal. They have kept up correspondence and it was explained to me that
23:36 Speaker 03 that family member sent a note to the engineer saying essentially, "I don't hold you responsible. It's not your fault." And I can only imagine how that engineer felt to finally hear that.
23:50 Lindsay Graham? It's amazing, but probably not surprising, how how high emotions run even decades and decades later. And you've already explained that you ran into trouble convincing everyone to speak. One subject who was also difficult to reach, but eventually agreed was Krista McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan. What was that interview like for you?
24:09 Speaker 03 Well, just to even sit down with Barbara was something that I'm just grateful for because when we reached out to Barbara, she was rightly skeptical of what we were looking to do. I think after the second or third conversation, and these conversations lasted multiple hours, she agreed for us to come to Idaho where she lives and conduct our interview. And so at that stage, we had not talked with anybody as close to Krista as Barbara. We had interviewed people, astronaut families who knew her, but not somebody like Barbara. Barbara was Krista's roommate. She was her backup. They trained side by side. Barbara herself was a teacher. She still is an educator.
24:53 Speaker 03 And I remember we set up for the interview long before she got there. And I took a walk just to kind of clear my head. And I just remember sitting on a park bench and I just started crying. I don't think it's that I was upset. I just understood that what we were going to be doing was getting one step closer to understanding this person and hearing from Barbara, who was there at the launch. But I have to say, one of the pieces of the story for Barbara that is so incredible is that she later on trained as an astronaut and she did go to space. So her perspective was really special because she wanted to continue the mission that they had started. And that was one of the promises that we made to her about our interview with her
25:38 Speaker 03 was that we didn't want our film to end just kind of wallowing in the tragedy because the space program continued on. And not only did the space program and the shuttle program continue on, she went as a teacher and an educator and trained as an astronaut and went up. And she actually taught the lessons that were intended for Krista. She taught those lessons in space and completed the mission.
26:03 Lindsay Graham? Another of your interview subjects who learned to look forward is Marcia Jarvis, wife of Greg Jarvis. He was a payload specialist in a Hughes Aircraft employee. While, of course, devastated by the loss of her husband, she does something special on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster every January. What is it?
26:20 Speaker 03 She wakes up before the sunrise and she goes somewhere quiet and private by herself and she watches the sunrise. The feeling and the idea behind that gesture every year is to remind herself that life goes on, that new days will continue, and to appreciate the beauty in the world. It was a beautiful moment when she shared that with us, and it's now something I do every year on the anniversary as well. I go by myself, pretty much the same hillside, and watch the sunrise. I always take a photograph with my phone and email it to her. And I remember, I forget which year, but one year I emailed it to
27:02 Speaker 03 her, and she thanked me because it was raining where she was, so she was unable to go outside and watch the sunrise.
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28:00 Speaker 06 Make sure to follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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28:50 Lindsay Graham? This must have been an emotionally taxing series to produce. How did it affect you?
28:55 Speaker 03 I think I spent a fair amount of time during the entire series feeling like this wasn't just something that was happening to me and I was the only one who was feeling those things. So I know we would wrap the shoot and we would all go get dinner together with the crew and we would chat through the day, try to lift each other's spirits, enjoy the fact that we were alive, we were together, we were making something that felt special. For me personally, I didn't anticipate this, but I started having a recurring dream. I'm not a huge dreamer at night, or at least if I am, I don't remember my dreams. But at a certain point in time during production, I started having this dream where I was driving in a convertible
29:39 Speaker 03 on the Pacific Coast Highway. The radio would be playing, it was sunny and beautiful, and all of a sudden, the car would burst into flames. And then I would wake up. It was jarring the first time it happened, but by the second time it happened, I figured out that what was happening probably was that my subconscious was so fixated on this story and trying to be empathetic of what it must have felt like to the people on the ground watching and what it even maybe felt like for the astronauts aboard the shuttle. So my subconscious was clearly channeling all of that and it manifested in a really terrible dream.
30:17 Lindsay Graham? The footage of the Challenger explosion is so imprinted on my mind's eye. I know exactly what it looks like. I may even have the correct trajectories of the two rocket boosters in my head as they careen away from the orbiter. It occurs to me that you've probably seen and processed these same images in three different manners. Once, as a child, when the accident happened. Once, making this film. And then, probably now, in hindsight, after the project. How is it different to see the footage of the explosion now as an adult? And perhaps after you've spent so much time working on this film?
30:48 Speaker 03 This actually speaks to the way we structured the series as well. Because when we were developing the show, and we were developing the series, we felt like if you watched it but didn't know all the astronauts, if you watched it and didn't know that there were engineers who tried to stop it, then you had one perspective. Maybe you just knew the teacher. And once you learned all those other elements, once you learned about who the astronauts were, once you knew that they were part of this original historic shuttle class that was saying that astronauts could be more than just white fighter pilots, you would watch the footage and feel something different.
31:29 Speaker 03 And so that's why we structured the series where it opens with the launch and you watch what happens. And we come back to it later in the series. We wanted to make the viewer feel what we had felt by doing all of our research, that if you watch the shuttle explode without all that context, you'll feel one thing. But if you watch it explode with all that other context, then it isn't just the death of these incredible seven Americans. It's also the sort of death of a dream, which was that space travel was going to be so easy and so regular that we can send anybody up. I mean, they were talking about sending Big Bird up at one point.
32:09 Speaker 03 And the Challenger stands as a reminder that space travel is just really, really complex. And it wasn't going to be as safe as they wanted it to be, despite the fact that they made every effort to make it feel that way. And I don't fault them for wanting to make the public feel that way. And I was a child who bought into that dream. But when the Challenger exploded, that really was the death of that dream for me.
32:32 Lindsay Graham? We learned in our series that it was the failure of the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters that caused the Challenger explosion. But this was a well-documented problem that many engineers at Morton Diechall tried very hard to get remediated. In your series, you are very careful to mention the subsequent destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry in 2003. You note how an investigation revealed a similar failure to fix a well-documented issue. How could this have happened twice?
33:00 Speaker 03 The simple answer is that space travel is really, really hard and that there are so many problems with this complex machine. They're always improving what they can do. That means consistently troubleshooting problem after problem after problem. And that's why these problems are well documented, because they're always trying to fix them. We didn't want to present Challenger as the only time that it happened. It would feel disrespectful to the other astronauts and their families. And it also showed that when the Challenger happened, there wasn't some nefarious person who knew it was going to
33:41 Speaker 03 happen and said, "Well, let it go anyways." And this other accident showed that. It showed that space travel is really complex. And because it is so difficult, there are accidents that will happen, unfortunately, that lead to very fatal moments in our history. A lot of scholarly research and thought has been put into looking at this case study to see what you can learn from it. And to look at all the ways in which things could have been dealt with differently, the ways in which certain messaging could have been heard louder and clearer. And also that as your teams grow larger and larger, you know, as you
34:23 Speaker 03 start having not dozens of people, but hundreds of people, or thousands of people in a chain, it becomes very difficult to manage any bit of dysfunction. And dysfunction has a way of bubbling under the surface. And actually, in making this series, I thought a lot about that. Because when you endeavor to make anything in a team setting with lots of different people, lots of different interests, you have money at stake, you have a time and a schedule. The risk factor for us is just failing and wasting money, wasting time. It's not life and death. But there are similarities. And so I thought a lot about that during the process of making
35:06 Speaker 03 that series. It's something I still think about with the film I'm directing now, which is how do you get in front of dysfunction? How do you identify it? And how do you talk about it in a way that doesn't create more anxiety for people, but hopefully leads to an open dialogue on how to solve the problem? And that was something I didn't anticipate learning from Challenger. And it's something I'm really grateful that has been introduced to my way of thinking and my process.
35:32 Lindsay Graham? That's beautiful. You have a framed photograph of the Challenger in your office, given to you by Arnie Aldrich's children. He was a NASA executive. What is the significance of that photo?
35:42 Speaker 03 When we went to interview Arnie, he walked us through his house and showed us a bunch of old artifacts and memorabilia from his days at NASA. And, you know, most of these folks have a lot of those things in their house, right? There's old framed photos, crew photos, patches, little models of the shuttle or rockets, those kinds of things. And it was always really interesting and fun to see everybody's house because they would show us these things. And so Arnie was walking us through his house before the interview. And I saw this very large photograph in a beautiful old wooden frame. And if you look closely on the shuttle, you can see which ones they are because it says Challenger,
36:25 Speaker 03 Discovery, or Enterprise. And this one said Challenger. So I asked him, what's the story with your Challenger photograph? It's a shot of the shuttle landing. And he said after the accident, when he went back to work, he had that photograph framed. And it was the last successful mission of the Challenger, of it landing back to Earth. And he decided to have it framed and put in his office so that he could look at it every day as a reminder that it was important to bring all the astronauts home. And, you know, Arnie unfortunately passed away before our series was finished. And then a few years later, his wife passed away.
37:07 Speaker 03 When Arnie's son and I guess his sister were cleaning out the house and going through all the old belongings and trying to figure out who would get what, they remembered hearing from Arnie's wife that our team had really responded to that one photo. So he called me and said, "We'd like to give it to you." And I think it was a few months later, a box showed up at my house and I opened it and found a beautiful inscription from Arnie's son and daughter on the back, just thanking us for including their father and capturing his story. The photograph's in my office today. Just this morning, I was looking up at it, thinking about Arnie and, and just being grateful that they thought to reach
37:51 Speaker 03 out to us and gift it to us.
37:53 Lindsay Graham? You actually chose to end your series with something that Arnie Aldrich said. What was it? And why did you choose this moment?
38:00 Speaker 03 You know, we do these interviews and many of them last two to three hours and you cover a lot of things. You talk about a lot of things. And the end of the series, we cover the next launch after Challenger, which happens in September 1988 and its discovery. And a lot of our voices from our series watched the launch in person. A lot of them watched it on television. And it felt that it was necessary to show that the problems of the Challenger, that the lessons were learned, the problems were troubleshoot and fixed, and that there was success after this. It was important to show that. And so when we
38:42 Speaker 03 got to asking Arnie about that moment and what it meant for him as a NASA employee to have been part of the team that helped fix it, to ensure that hopefully there would never be an accident like that again, he said, "We had done our job and we could go on." And we did. It wasn't just what he said, it's how he said it. There was still sort of this lingering emotion in his voice and in his face. I was watching the series today, just the ending, because I had forgotten what Arnie said exactly. And I just, when we got to that moment and heard what he said, I was in my office and I looked up at the picture that his family had gifted to us. And I just started crying.
39:24 Speaker 03 I think watching the series and feeling those feelings about this terrible story is a good thing. I don't think it's something to shy away from. It's a terrible moment in our history, but it is a story that also ends with a lot of light and there is a lot of hope. And to talk to the people who lost their family members and to hear how they got through these tough times and to hear their own ways of processing death and loss, I think there's a lot of lessons in there for all of us.
39:54 Lindsay Graham? Well, Stephen Leckart, thank you so much for talking to me today on American Scandal.
39:58 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
40:00 Lindsay Graham? That was my conversation with Stephen Leckart. He co-directed, co-created, and produced the 2020 Netflix series Challenger: The Final Flight.
40:12 Lindsay Graham? From Wondery, this is episode five of our series on the Challenger disaster from American Scandal. In the next series, at the Station nightclub in Rhode Island, a rock concert turned deadly when the pyrotechnic displays set the building on fire. In a matter of just minutes, 100 people were killed. And as investigators looked into the cause of the tragedy, they uncovered a perfect storm of mistakes and negligence.
40:38 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.
41:11 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Paulie Stryker. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Sound design by Gabriel Gould. Music by Lindsay Graham. Produced by John Reed. Managing producer Joe Florentino. Senior producer Andy Herman. Development by Stephanie Jens. And executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louis, and Aaron O'Flaherty for Wondery.
41:43 Speaker 04 Alice, have you ever wondered why the Mini is so small?
41:47 Speaker 07 The Skir or the Magnum?
41:49 Speaker 04 Well, I meant the iconic British car. Because in 1956, Britain's oil supply was suddenly cut off. Petrol rationing was brought in and the car industry was scrambling around for a vehicle that hardly used any fuel. Enter the Mini.
42:03 Speaker 07 Interesting, but actually not technically British Scandal series material.
42:08 Speaker 04 Well, the reason they had to save petrol is because the Prime Minister started a war and lied about why.
42:14 Speaker 07 Okay, scandal siren going off.
42:16 Speaker 04 I'm Matt Ford.
42:17 Speaker 07 And I'm Alice Levine.
42:18 Speaker 04 And our latest British Scandal series involves a secret meeting in a French villa, a Prime Minister running on amphetamines.
42:24 Speaker 07 An Egyptian president that everyone fancied, the end of the British Empire, and at the heart of it, a canal.
42:31 Speaker 04 This is the story of the Suez Plot.
42:34 Speaker 07 Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Audible.
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