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).
