Flashback, January 1986: Challenger Explosion Rocks Space Shuttle Program

With its new shuttle flight delayed repeatedly by high winds, a frozen hatch handle and other issues, the National Air Space and Space Administration (NASA) gave the go-ahead to launch Challenger STS-51L—and watched along with the rest of the world as it exploded just 73 seconds after blastoff in late January 1986.

Tremendous publicity had been building for the flight in the months before, largely because of New Hampshire educator Christa McAuliffe, a civilian who had been tapped for NASA's "Teacher in Space" program.

The shock was compounded because this represented the first set of NASA casualties since Apollo 1 crewmembers Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee died during a launchpad exercise on Jan. 27, 1967. Space flight, once full of danger, had come to seem entirely safe and routine, with the space shuttle program in particular successfully completing 24 missions in a row.

That night, Ronald Reagan preempted his scheduled State of the Union speech to deliver perhaps the most memorable speech of his Presidency, quoting poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. to evoke how the seven deceased astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of earth.”

But his more important action lay less in reassuring a grieving nation than in signing, with bipartisan support, Executive Order 12546 creating the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

Tom Reinhardt’s December 2021 post on “The Days Forward” blog on his experience as a staffer for the blue-ribbon Rogers Commission pinpointed how the panel’s deliberations took a decisive turn.

Chairman William Rogers, a former Attorney General and Secretary of State, had just heard from NASA officials that they had seen a plume of flame escaping from one of the solid rocket boosters but had not passed the information up the chain of command. Rogers immediately left the room and phoned Reagan.

When he returned, Reinhardt was told by his boss, “the mission of the Commission had just changed from overseeing the Challenger investigation to conducting it.”

The 11 active commission members (General Chuck Yeager ended up attending only one meeting) were then divided into work groups with support staff tasked with particular investigative responsibilities. Meanwhile, several thousand personnel from NASA and the Department of Defense searched for and collected the surviving shuttle wreckage.

During the investigation, the commission discovered that sharply dropping temperatures on the morning of the flight led to a failure of the O-rings sealing the joints in the boosters. . Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, had been alerted about this by structural engineer Roger Boisjoly, who as early as six months before the disaster had written a memo warning that the defect could result in “a catastrophe of the highest order–loss of human life.” On a teleconference the night before the launch between the company and NASA, he and other engineers at Morton Thiokol urged that the flight be delayed.

But his listeners, in thrall to the recent shuttle safety record, the notion of “acceptable risk,” and the existence of a backup O-ring, dismissed these concerns. As Boisjoly remembered:

I then grabbed the photographic evidence showing the hot gas blow-by and placed it on the table and, somewhat angered, admonished them to look and not ignore what the photos were telling us, namely, that low temperature indeed caused more hot gas blow-by in the joints. I too received the same cold stares as [fellow engineer] Arnie [Thompson] with looks as if to say, ‘Go away and don’t bother us with the facts.’ At that moment I felt totally helpless and felt that further argument was fruitless, so I, too, stopped pressing my case.

The next morning, Thompson couldn’t bear to watch the launch live on TV. After denouncing the dismissal of his warnings and his colleagues’ admonitions as “unethical” at the Rogers Commission hearings, Boisjoly felt the attitude towards him at Morton Thiokol uncomfortable enough that he eventually resigned.

(Olivia Burgess’s excellent post about Boisjoly’s dilemma as participant-turned-whistleblower can be found here.)

The NASA decisionmakers, according to the Rogers Commission, “were unaware of the initial written recommendation of the contractor advising against the launch at temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit [11.7 degrees C] and the continuing opposition of the engineers at [Morton] Thiokol after the management reversed its position."

The final report of the commission, released four months after it was formed, made the following recommendations on how to avoid future disasters, including in the areas of:

*design;
*independent oversight;
*shuttle management structure;
*astronauts in management;
*a shuttle safety panel;
*criticality review and hazard analysis;
*safety organization;
*improved communications;
*landing safety;
*launch abort and crew escape;
*flight rate; and
*maintenance safeguards.

Although Morton Thiokol executives never faced criminal charges over the disaster, they, along with NASA, absorbed blame for it, and were hit where it hurt—in the pocketbook (a reported $4.6 million settlement paid to the families of four crew members and a $10 million penalty taken out of future profits) and reputational loss (as an avatar for engineering negligence and prioritizing financial contract pressure over safety).