5 Join Kristen Stewart in Prime Video's 'The Challenger' — SkimNews
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- Danny Huston is set to portray William Rogers, who led the investigation into the 1986 Challenger explosion.
- Sofia Black D'Elia will play astronaut Judy Resnik, the fourth woman to fly in space.
- Shea Whigham is cast as Roger Boisjoly, the mechanical engineer who strongly opposed the Challenger launch.
- Boris McGiver will portray William 'Bill' Lucas, the NASA official blamed for the Challenger disaster.
- Paul Sparks is set to play Larry Mulloy, NASA SRB project manager.
- Will Arnett, previously announced, will portray George Abbey, Director of Flight Crew Operations for NASA, who assigned Sally Ride to the crew of 1983's STS-7.
- Maggie Cohn created the series, inspired by Meredith E. Bagby's book "The New Guys"; James Hawes directs with production from Big Swing Productions, Amblin Television, and Nevermind Pictures.
Why it matters: The casting embeds prestige drama directly into real history: Whigham's Boisjoly and McGiver's Lucas place the moral conflict at NASA — engineer vs. official — at the center of the series, while D'Elia's Resnik and Stewart's Ride foreground the women whose spaceflight breakthroughs bookended the Challenger tragedy.
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