Welcome to Litsy!

This 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

#12Booksof2024 Day 9

My favorite book of September was The House is On Fire, which I read with my IRL book club.

@Andrew65

I read the author‘s note first and it made this story set in deadliest urban disaster in US history at the time (1811) even more disturbing. That a slave has no obituary in local papers to document one‘s time on earth is not shocking but incredibly sad. That a white man would prefer a wife dead to disabled and could make that happen - ugh! That a slave is compelled to run into danger to save whites from death is heroism beyond measure.

....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.