space vehicle carried a crew on its maiden flight. If the shuttle’s triumphs were the country’s triumphs, then the shuttle’s failures would be blows to national pride.Ī 1980s documentary excerpted in The Final Flight notes that the first shuttle’s inaugural launch marked the first time a U.S. “I think this epic flight of Columbia proves once again that the United States is number one,” NASA acting administrator Alan Lovelace declared when Columbia completed the program’s first fully operational mission in April 1981. The sleek space shuttle, a reusable successor to the Apollo program, represented progress, human mastery over orbit, and American ingenuity. In the wake of the war in Vietnam and the racial unrest and stagflation of the 1970s, “the country needed something to feel good about,” former astronaut Robert Crippen says in The Final Flight. Abrams, and others-examines why the shuttle program mattered so much to many Americans, and how its importance to the public intensified both the pressure that contributed to the Challenger’s loss and the crisis of confidence that followed. The documentary-developed by Glen Zipper and Steven Leckart, directed by Leckart and Junge, and executive produced by Zipper, J.J. “Even from the pitching stage, we knew there wasn’t anything that was a huge reveal,” director Daniel Junge said in an interview conducted by Netflix and provided to the press.Įven without a huge reveal, though, the documentary is revealing, especially for those who learned about the Challenger long after the fact or never delved deeply into what went wrong. There’s no new information about how and why the catastrophe occurred unlike some of the sensational subjects that have become fodder for Netflix nonfiction, the Challenger’s destruction is a mostly solved mystery. The Final Flight tells the alternately inspiring and dismaying story of the Challenger via archival clips, fresh footage from home movies, and new interviews with former shuttle program personnel and relatives of the fliers lost in the fatal launch. NASA and SpaceX Count Down to the Next Stage of Space Travel How NASA Keeps Earth’s Germs From Reaching Mars Yet The Final Flight makes a strong case for forcing oneself to see it again, even-or, perhaps, especially-at a time when we’re overwhelmed by the disasters unfolding in front of our eyes. The destruction of the Challenger was a horror that everyone who was watching live or on taped delay wished they could unsee. The new Netflix limited series, which debuted on Wednesday, chronicles the lead-up to, causes of, and fallout from the fiery disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger 73 seconds after its launch on January 28, 1986, which resulted in the deaths of its seven-member crew of six astronauts and high school social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe. It’s a three-hour exhumation of a traumatic event that imprinted itself on the psyche of anyone who was watching when it went down. Which makes this a less than optimal time for Netflix to ask the question that its app is posing this week: Can we interest you in a four-part documentary about a devastating national tragedy?Īs an alternative to the endless hours of low-stakes escapism that streaming services serve up to temporarily take our troubles away, Challenger: The Final Flight isn’t an easy sell. When we aren’t preoccupied by case counts and death tolls, our screens are sending us warnings of economic collapse, flashing scenes of repeated police violence, and reminding us that the leaders who are supposed to be bulwarks against chaos have, through a combination of cruelty and complacency, only exacerbated the suffering and deepened the divides. More than six months after the country caught the world’s worst case of coronavirus and some of its more sensible citizens retreated inside, the United States is still convulsing from the effects of its failed response to the pandemic.
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