User Reviews

I found it interesting that the name "Roger Boisjoly" wasn't mentioned once. The man who probably fought harder than anyone to fix the o-ring problem gets passed by? While the series held my interest for all four episodes, a little more tech and a little less teacher would have been better, for me at least.

I've seen every documentary on space and the Challenger that have been produced. Many were bad, some were good. This four part series is pretty good, covering familiar ground and likely a good refresher for anyone who lived through those times, or more beneficially for those younger people who are just raising their awareness and understanding of this troubling catastrophe.

The producers did use the "it's going to blow up" scenario as the dramatic leverage (e.g. cliffhanger) here. I think its overuse is justifiable, though, given the fact that if the NASA decision makers had listened to the whistleblowers and weighed the risks, the crew would have been pulled off Challenger until corrective design changes could be made (or at the very least, until a launch attempt in February when temperatures were above freezing could be attained).

One remarkable thing to note: Americans were proud of our accomplishments then, and the early footage of the shuttle launches proves it with various video segments showing people actually waving flags and saying how proud they were of their country. It is sad to think that that very footage seems so alien now, given how bad many citizens of America love to trash their own country.

I can remember this as a kid and always had a fascination with the disaster. And this is a amazing documentary. Brings back so many feelings.

Full disclosure: I am a space enthusiast. I would have loved to go to space. And I vehemently support the US manned space program.

However... I have lived through all three major US space catastrophes, where we managed to kill (as of today) 17 astronauts in spacecraft (albeit three of those on the ground), and the sad truth about each of those tragedies is that they occurred because of people who put "schedules" and/or "money", ahead of crew safety. My "impression" is that, at the moment, we seem as though we might be over that hurdle (in our space program), but if for no other reason, this four-part documentary should serve as a cautionary tale, as it clearly shows how seemingly intelligent people, can make extremely dumb (or selfish) decisions, with total disregard for human life. It also clearly shows how, when incidents like these occur, you absolutely need to bring in a bevy of _independent_ outsiders to oversee the inevitable investigations that follow, because the guilty parties (be they individuals, or corporations) will go out of their way to try to gloss over their culpability, in having caused failures on this scale.

The focus of this documentary is different than a lot a previous efforts that cover this tragedy. It does go into a lot of detail about the root cause of the accident, how it was already a known (and very concerning) problem, and how/why managers within the contractor (Morton Thiokol) and NASA ranks choose to rationalize away the risks, simply to try to keep the shuttle program "on schedule". But this documentary spends just as much time talking about the seven people who lost their lives, and numerous family members and friends of the astronauts participated in new interviews, to give a more thorough understanding of who these people were, and what their lives were before the tragedy, and could have been, had their lives not ended so unnecessarily.

Also, there are interviews with people who risked the livelihoods to come forward during the Rogers Commission investigation, to provide information that no one else was providing, which clearly detailed the root cause of the accident, and the culpability of the people who decided to ignore the warnings of "impending doom". And, as with the family members, there are also new interviews (somewhat surprisingly) with the key (living) Thiokol and NASA employees who participated in the (flawed) recommendation to launch Challenger, even though their own engineers were vehemently opposed to doing so.

Anyway, this is an important slice of US Space Program history, and the series gives a solid understanding of how/why this tragedy occurred, as well as an "up close and personal" look at the people involved. I highly recommend it.

I have spent much of my adult life avoiding thinking about this tragedy. It is a case study on how an organization can become wicked and its members essentially the epitome of evil.

For me it was just horribly sad to watch this and there is a prevalent sense of horror as events move toward the inevitable ending.

What made it worth watching for me was to learn about Feynman's role. I knew the outline of it but not the specifics. It's quite amazing.

What astonishes me is there are these awful, old, gross NASA administrators who are still totally unrepentant, although they are clearly and obviously to blame for what happened.

Gripping, informative, and historically significant

Many born in the 90's have no recollection of a time when space exploration failed. This documentary looks at the successes of NASA in terms of inclusion during the 1970's and 80's. Then looked at how NASA got greedy and tried to do too many things at once, 7 great people were sacrificed in this greediness in January of 1986.

I rarely cry over any television program or film, but this one did me in. I was 13 years old when the Challenger tragedy occurred, and my school had each class watch it live on TV. I will never forget the feeling of watching this happen real time, when my classmates and I were so thrilled and excited about an everyday school teacher going into space. It gave us all hope that we could do anything we wanted to do if we wanted it badly enough. Then, the unthinkable happened. They actually canceled school the next day to allow our young minds and hearts to come to terms with what we saw.

Like the tragedy of the Titanic, this is a bold reminder that mankind is NOT infallible and is inherently fragile. We may *advance* beyond our wildest dreams, but whenever human involvement is part of the equation, the worst can happen.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of these seven brave crewmembers and all of the others who have perished in other disasters. I had forgotten that they were able to retrieve the bodies of the Challenger crew. Hopefully that provided some sense of peace for those who continue to mourn their loss

RIP: Michael J. Smith Francis R. (Dick) Scobee Ronald E. McNair Ellison S. Onizuka Sharon Christa McAuliffe Gregory Jarvis Judith A. Resnik

You are true American HEROES and I will never forget you and your sacrifice.

As someone with a keen interest in NASA and space travel I was looking forward to this documentary. However, perhaps depending on what you're looking for, it mostly fails to deliver. What should be a fascinating in to how this terrible tragedy came to pass unfortunately falls a little flat over the 4 episodes. There is probably about 1 episodes worth of content here, padded out with sentimental testimony from family members of the crew and some dull interviews with former NASA employees.

The facts that are known about this inexcusable disaster are all over the net. If you are interested in the technical aspects of the accident read the Rogers Commission report.

This is the story of the Challenger disaster from the viewpoint of a lot of people that were there at the time. I found those views compelling and with all of that background information, by the fourth episode I felt like I was back in 1985. It was like I was right there, with all of those people.

Not exactly on topic but a bit of trivia: I worked for Morton Thiokol when the Challenger accident happened. There was a mandatory employee meeting the day after the disaster. We were all required to sign non-disclosure agreements. We were told that if we were caught saying ANYTHING, even the word Challenger, to ANYONE (even co-workers), we would be fired immediately.

Netflix has again made documentary is exciting to watch and easy to binge. The remastered footage looks fantastic and the documentary features compelling interviews with families and friends, as well as key players in NASA, Morton-Thiokol, and from the Rogers Commission.

Unfortunately, the documentary does not have much to say. The primary focus of the documentary is introducing us to the lives and personalities of the crew and portraying the heartbreak that their families went through during and after the disaster. However, the documentary does not tell much of a story and is more focused on just recounting the events that occurred.

Sadly, this documentary is a missed opportunity. We could have watched a compelling story about 'go-fever' and how a system can push an institution to a disaster, like HBO's Chernobyl, or a technical exposition, like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, or even something entirely different that told a story from the perspective of the families. However, we mostly got great footage and great interviews bundled together in a way that does not tell a coherent story.

Much like President Kennedy's assassination on 11/22/63 or the terrorist events of 9/11/01, the moment that the space shuttle Challenger exploded just minutes after take-off in 1986 is one of those "where were you when..." moments. This documentary looks back at the tragedy and its context in American culture at the time.

The first two episodes are more history lessons than anything else, setting the groundwork for why the space shuttle program--and Challenger specifically--was a topic of conversation throughout the 1980s. It also examines all the crew members of that fateful voyage, including of course the much-publicized schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Your enjoyment mileage may vary for these episodes, as besides interviews with surviving family members they don't bring much more to the table other than context.

The final two episodes, however, really dig into the exact reason behind the malfunction (faulty o-rings) and clearly re-trace a faulty decision-making process from NASA that placed slavish devotion to schedule (and some hubris mixed in) over protecting human life. These episodes are riveting, especially when key NASA players are interviewed for their thoughts after the passage of time. You might be surprised at the recalcitrance of some of them.

Overall, this is a solid and balanced (both context and deep-dive) look at an incredibly sad event. It will bring tears to your eyes on multiple occasions. The access to family members of the astronauts, former high-level NASA officials, and even certain celebrities of the time are the hallmark here, along with a solemn lesson to be learned about the value of safety versus hubris.

In general is an interesting documentary but it's too much romanticise and slow. The idea of interviewing also the families is good but, sincerely, I hoped for something more incentrate on the investigation and the causes and effects. Anyway, this is a show that everyone has to watch, in order to know and remember.

I'll try to keep this brief. As other reviews have mentioned, this doco misses the opportunity to tell the whole story of the Challenger disaster. You see two seperate but connected narratives here. The experiences of the family members is one story (although it mostly focusses on Christa McAuliffe) and the retell from the workers being the other. I didn't mind these two stories but there was too much focus on the families. It's not that the family members stories isn't important, it just drags on for too long. They needed to equal or portray more of the story of the workers and key decision makers. The four episodes as they stand could have been made into a single movie length doco but if they exposed more of the political and NASA side of things then this could have easily been four or more episodes. This doco did really well to get almost all of the key decision makers to share the justification of their decisions but only in short parts. Since the film makers went to all of this effort, why did they only use snippets of these very interesting individuals/interviews as I have many questions I want answers to (and even the families might still to this day also). By reading the Wikipedia page, I've learnt far more than this doco presented and that's sad and frustrating after spending almost three hours on this. It would have been so interesting to really explore the background decisions made for this flight. They did well with how they told the story of the meeting that took place the night before the flight; that is the type of doco that needed to contine throughout the four episodes. I could refer to more parts of the doco that needed improvement or were done well but I still recommend watching the doco and then do your own reading post viewing to answer the questions most viewers will still have.

I remember sitting in my 5th grade classroom watching the Challenger lift off and then explode. We all knew something was wrong but we weren't sure what. The teacher turned the tv off and left the room coming back in a few minutes to tell us the Challenger had exploded. Everyone was in shock and I remember going home and crying that night. It was a traumatic thing for so many children to witness and watching this brought that back for me. It's still hard to watch the explosion.

The thing I like about this documentary is that it interviews the family and actual people involved. It taps into not only what really happened behind the scenes but how witnessing the disaster, and loosing their loved ones, effected the families. I definitely recommend it.

This mini series was really well made. I learned a lot about the astronauts, their families, and even more about about why money is more important to congressmen than people's life. But you Larry Mulloy, NASA Manager (1982-1986) you are the main responsible of the death of 7 amazing souls.

This documentary is great. While I was watchingIt I couldn't help but think that somebody oughta do a Chernobyl like TV series with the Challenger story. Trust me, it would a smashing hit.

The earlier, looser episodes allow for more of an unabashed wallow in the particulars of the era, from the cringe-inducing (like Tom Brokaw asking Challenger crew-member Judith Resnik if anyone had ever suggested she was too cute to be an astronaut) to the retroactively ironic (like Jerry Seinfeld joking on The Tonight Show that the only way to interest people in the space program again would be to draft ordinary people who didn't want to go). The Final Flight captures how much the space shuttle program's first era shadowed 1980s culture, from the multiple congratulatory statements and phone calls from Ronald Reagan to the guest appearances by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Peter Billingsley at launches.

But Billingsley's presence here-in older footage and in new interviews-also provides a useful pivot-point into episode four's more substantive material. It's harrowing to hear Billingsley describe what it was like to witness the Challenger explosion in person, standing in a crowd of people who weren't sure what they were seeing until they heard the creepily detached voices of NASA Mission Control saying, "Obviously a major malfunction," and, "The vehicle has exploded." It's hard not to be overwhelmed by the images from that day-the weeping spectators, the contrail lingering in the sky-and by the testimony of family members describing their still-painful feelings of loss. (Try not to break down when one of the astronauts' wives talks about disappearing into the bedroom to hug his clothes, and then finding the Valentine's Day card he was planning to give her when he came home.) The sentimentality quickly shifts to tension and outrage as The Final Flight gets to what happened next, which involved NASA stonewalling the press, the media doing their own analyses of the footage, President Reagan convening an exploratory commission (and giving its head the command, "Don't embarrass NASA"), and a few unruly scientists (including the late, great Richard Feynman) slipping past the gatekeepers to say what needed to be said, about the agency's increasing preferences for cost-cutting and upping the number of missions over basic safety protocols. The series ends with an impressive flourish.

Final Verdict:

So sure, The Final Flight could be a lot more focused. But Leckart and Junge ultimately have the goods, and they do deliver. Their final half-hour in particular is incredibly dramatic, echoing a lot of the discussions we're still having-all about whether it's better to be honest with the American people, or to preserve our myths and heroes.

The Challenger disaster holds special meaning for me. This was the first time I had ever dealt with death or anything bad happening - this documentary even holds a famous photo of a classmate of mine's shock on the day of. I can remember all of it like yesterday, even down to what I was wearing. So anything I can do to learn more about it is something I want to do. This documentary does not, however, provide more information than I already new. It does seem, like a lot of Netflix documentaries, to be written around the footage they had and the people they could get to talk to them. It does provide some new footage and photos that I hadn't seen before so that is a plus but most of it is not compelling or interesting footage. The documentary is smart not to take a position on the good guys and the bad guys here. Though we all know they shouldn't have launched, now, the documentary muddles the waters showing how many compelling arguments there were for and against launching and you come away realizing the complexity of the situation. Ultimately the tragedy lead to the end of the shuttle program - along with the 2003 tragedy. And now, we know, this isn't the way to go.

Interesting but drags more than it needed to. Would have been much better served as a 2 hour documentary instead of trying to be a viral series.

Way too little focus on the engineering, logistics and mission critical details that led to the accident. The series has mainly a sentimental value.

It's amazing to watch this, I would like to start with that. Even watching recordings for decades ago, I become emotional wi5 every shuttle launch. Having owned and watched all the documentaries released on all the Apollo missions, I was excited for this. However, in the first episode in giving us a background on the development of the program and Astronauts , it was sad, disappointing and surprising that the Enterprise was not mentioned or shown. That was the first test of the shuttle and landing, while it did not launch and was carried up to glide down, it was an important and historically significant part of the amazing Space Shuttle Program.