Challenger Tragedy - In Depth, and Deeply Felt

Patchw0rk F0g writes "On this, the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, Jay Barbree has a moving and in-depth piece on this international disaster." From the article: "During several earlier shuttle missions, disaster did everything it could to crawl into the shuttle launch system and turn it into tumbling flaming wreckage. The primary O-rings on those flights suffered severe erosion from superheated gases, sometimes accompanied by lesser erosion. And the erosion had occurred after launch temperatures much higher than on this freezing Florida day -- 53 degrees was the lowest launch-time temperature up to that time. The booster engineers felt helpless. For months, they had been studying the O-ring seal problem. They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'"

Comments

Re:Motivation

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you forgetting that NASA, and Morton Thiokol management is solely responsible for the disaster, the engineers protested the launch.

Re:Motivation

[pallmall1]

Obviously this wasn't a big enough motivation and it should be a wake up call for anyone who trusts that a contractor or engineer will tell you that there is something wrong with a product on their own.

Spoken like a true non-engineer. It was at the urging of Nasa officials that the launch was approved to take place. Here's a quote from the Nasa website relating the facts that you have conveniently overlooked in your rush to condemn engineers and manufacturers:

However, in a closed meeting at the Kennedy Space Center on February 14, Commission members were "visibly disturbed" to learn that engineers from the firm that manufactured the SRM, Morton Thiokol Inc., had the night before recommended against launching Challenger in the cold temperatures predicted for the next morning; that their managers, at the apparent urging of NASA officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center, had overruled their recommendation; and that more senior NASA managers responsible for the launch commit decision were unaware of this contentious interaction. --bold added

There's nothing insightful about the parent post, except for the insight gained into the readiness of some to unfairly accuse an entire profession they know nothing about of what basically amounts to murder. I'd like to know what the parent poster's motivations are, other than to try to sound cool on slashdot.