The Challenger disaster: we can't say we weren't warned about American hubris | Emma Brockes

Netflix's documentary about the 1986 space shuttle tragedy is a timely meditation on the perils of exceptionalism

In the first episode of Challenger, a new documentary series on Netflix that revisits the 1986 space shuttle disaster, there is a scene that will be remembered by anyone who was old enough to watch the news in that era. The montage of seven smiling astronauts - most famously, Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space" - gives way to footage of the shuttle's launch and, 73 seconds later, the explosion over Cape Canaveral. The camera shifts to the faces of the spectators, as they move from excitement to the realisation that something terrible has happened.

There is nothing so remote as recent history, and it is a jolt to recall how shocking that footage actually was: the deaths of seven people broadcast on live television, watched by millions of Americans. Stranger still, however, is the view of the United States at 30 years' distance. The documentary does a fine job of piecing together the incompetence at Nasa that led to the disaster, but it's the chronicle of what happened publicly in the years leading up to the explosion - the agency's hard sell on the American dream, in line with the country's confident self-image - that delivers the biggest shock. Watching grainy scenes of big-haired Americans smiling and striving and reaching for the stars, I felt a nostalgia so powerful that before I could stop myself, I'd found myself thinking, Wow, the US really was great back then."