A disaster foretold The story behind 1986's Challenger space shuttle explosion is a gripping catalogue of underfunding and stifling bureaucracy

In 1986, two catastrophic events occurred on either side of the cold war divide that shocked the world. On 28 January, 73 seconds after takeoff, the US space shuttle Challenger broke apart in mid-air, killing all seven astronauts on board and traumatising millions of viewers watching live on TV. Three months later, on 26 April, a meltdown at Chornobyl sent a radioactive cloud across the USSR and Europe. Two workers died immediately and the estimated death toll over time ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands. It's widely believed to have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

- Killian Fox

In his 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl, the British writer Adam Higginbotham reconstructed the latter event in forensic detail, building up to the meltdown and tracking its aftermath with the skill of a great thriller writer. It's one of the most queasily compelling books I've ever read, and the scenes in which ill-equipped workers venture into the stricken reactor in the hope of containing the fallout are permanently seared into my memory.

Now Higginbotham is tackling the former event, and despite the awful spectacle of the Challenger disaster and the media frenzy around it at the time-heightened by the presence on board of the charismatic schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe - it would seem the more difficult of the two incidents to turn into a nonfiction pageturner tense enough to make your palms sweat.

For one thing, the Challenger's demise though it punctured Nasa's reputation for competency under pressure, and rattled the US's conception of itself as a spacefaring nation - did not have the empire-toppling force of Chornobyl, which also hobbled the cause of nuclear energy. For another, though the key event at Chornobyl unfolded very quickly, the danger persisted long after the meltdown and rippled outwards to affect millions of people.

The Challenger disaster, by contrast, was over within seconds, and besides the impact on the astronauts and their families, the main damage in the aftermath was to the reputations of those who pushed for the launch despite being aware of fatal flaws in the technology.