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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.'"
According to the book The Black Box, the last words were "Uh oh".
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I was in preschool or something when the disaster happened. I had no awareness of it until many years later.
But when I think of the disaster now, I have the somewhat odd reaction that I don't really feel that the real tragedy was the loss of Challenger and its crew.
When I think about the 20th anniversiary of Challenger, the tragedy I feel is that it seems like NASA has done almost nothing of note since then.
It seems like somewhere around the Challenger disaster, the pioneering attitude of NASA that had been its hallmark up until then took something of a backseat. Somewhere around 20 years ago, probably not at Challenger or because of it but certainly sometime around then, NASA changed from being a truly important thing of importance to the public to just being something the government does. 20 years later, the manned space program has not progressed one single step beyond where it was when Challenger blew up; we're still stuck using the exact same shuttle fleet, and the manned program has been entirely preoccupied with the maintenence of a couple of space stations that aren't really that far beyond SkyLab and whose crews are preoccupied just keeping the things in the sky. NASA has had a small handful of true triumphs with its unmanned probes since that time, but the successes have been far between and have tended to receive only a fraction of the attention given in the public eye to NASA's failures.
And when I think about this, and realize that it represents, essentially, the loss of the nation's manned space program sometime about 20 years ago, it tends to overshadow entirely in my mind the tragedy of the loss of Challenger's intrepid crew sometime about 20 years ago.
Is this a callous response, or a reasonable one?
Another great account of Feynman's involvement in the post-Challenger investigation is in James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius, which is a great book otherwise. Incredible mind, awesome person, that Feynman was, I wish I could have met him...
First off, I actually read the article - all eight pages of it. I was also a college student attending Purdue the day of the crash studying, oddly enough, aeronautical engineering and taking a class in propulsion with a proffessor who was a consultant for Morton-Thiokol (just Thiokol soon after). I remember a few things about this in particular.
It seemed that, almost as soon as the camera crew realized what had happened, they zeroed in on McCauliff's family. It took a while for the cameraman to get his payoff though, she didn't really react for quite some time. No doubt not fully able to comprehend what just happened.
When I got to my class that morning (psychology), I found the professor had also just seen the footage, he cancelled the class. None of us were really into it at that point.
The local news was all over the propulsion professor asking him for theories/insight. At that point though, nobody really knew what had happened and speculation is foolish.
By the end of that day, I was hearing "Need Another Seven Astronauts". In contrast, I've yet to hear any such wise-assed remarks about the Columbia reentry disaster.
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It's easy to second guess NASA's decision making but, when you are in that moment, it's a hard trigger to pull. I've no doubt that engineers were concerned about the integrity of the O-ring seal. However, when they launched, they were within published spec. Sadly, the spec was wrong. In that situation, it becomes your (expert) opinion vs. established data. You might be right, but it's hard to push through.
I say all of this because I'm right in the middle of something similar. I see a situation that management characterizes as "agressive" and I would call "reckless" - but it's just my opinion. I can't go to the appropriate regulating agencies with anything that would stick. All I can really do is what I've done, I resigned. On paper, I said the recent benefits change was not meeting my needs. Behind close doors, however, I went into very frank detail about how I felt their current philosophies could put people at risk, and how I could no longer represent them in good faith.
I looked for a way to compel the needed changes from my position, but was unsuccessful. I was well respected there, perhaps by resigning and making sure they understood why, they will be motivated to re-evalute. I don't really know.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
According to Aristotle, who may or may not have known what he was talking about, the "most tragic" stories are those that involve morally average people (not especially good or bad, morally), who are of great stature or who have enjoyed great fortune, who fall from a state of happiness to a low state due to some "mistake made in ignorance".
Note: this has nothing to do with hubris, which does not mean "pride" anyway..
So we have our social studies teacher, a woman of national stature, enjoying great good fortune (the one selected out of 1100), who is presumably neither extraordinarily virtuous nor vicious, who died as the result of a hamartia (to use Aristotle's term).
What was her hamartia, her "mistake made in ignorance"? It was boarding a vehicle, assuming that the guys responsible for the "go/no-go" decision were paying attention to the guys who actually built the vehicle.
The crew of STS-51L are tragic figures by any definition--the fact that there are countless millions of other such figures notwithstanding--but if you are going to be pedantic about "tragedy", you will find that they fit Aristotle's bill especially well.
One of the reason more failure modes are now survivable for the crew is that post-Challenger a bailout ability was added: If the shuttle is stable and under control and still not too high, but has insufficient power to either attain orbit or reach an emergency-landing airstrip, the crew can put it on autopilot and bail out with parachutes, using an egress pole that allows them to clear the left shuttle wing.
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And the problems at NASA continued in January 2003 with the Columbia explosion. Presentation-of-data guru, Edward Tufte, makes a good claim that clumsy PowerPoint inhibited decent analysis that could've prevented a disaster. (Tufte cites Feynman's work among others.)
That is the dumbest comment I've ever heard. I watched the launch in my high school library as it happened, and I can tell you that, while horrible and shocking, the destruction of the Challenger is nothing at all like 9/11. They don't even fall into the same ballpark. The Challenger accident was just that, an accident. Nobody wanted it to happen, but it did. It was a terrible accident that happened during our quest for knowledge and discovery. 9/11 happened due to meticulous and malicious planning on the part of some extremist followers of Islam. 9/11 killed over 3000 people. People who, unlike the 7 astronauts killed when the Challenger went up, didn't realize they were taking a risk when they went to work (or got on an airplane). Never, ever compare the two, its like apples and oranges.
Volatile? While the fuel is a bit more volatile than tire rubber, it isn't a great deal more so. The fuel itself resembles a soft rubber. The one issue is that once the fuel ignites, it doesn't stop burning until all of the fuel is consumed.
OTOH, jst before the first flight of Columbia, NASA and Rockwell engineers discovered a trick circuit that could lead to simultaneous SRB ignition and separation. THAT would ae left one hell of a mess on the area around the launch pad.
I am a space scientist/physicist who worked directly on OMS shuttle components. I chose to resign in June, 1985, from a test engineer position at a major spacelab, citing insufficient support for safety and concern for the physics of flight: the environment of those times was, in my view, a concern for how much money could be made, and how much we individuals could pocket for ourselves. I was asked to lecture on my final day, and warned that someone would die, in a big way, if we engineers did not get back to thinking about what we were there for. Six months later, I flipped on the tube, saw Dan Rather somber, knew it popped, flipped the tube back off.
I've been watching a history channel show on NASA and the missions from the early 60's through today. It's interesting how deep the emotions are but one thing that's obvious is that the people in mission control have had to make some very intense decisons over the last 4 and a half decades. It's easy to blame engineers who did not yell loud enough or management that did not listen or political administrations that were pushing for success, but the truth is while there have been a handful (3) of tragedies resulting in some devastating accidents, there have also been some tremendous successes.
I've watched a lot of the films and read alot the news reports of the various NASA missions and it seems to me that the engineers and managers in the control room and the astronauts in the vehicles during the good times and the devastating times are some very dedicated people who know the risks and try to make the best decisions they can at the time. Remember folks alot of these earlier missions were run with slide rules or calculators and a hell of lot of gut and intuition.
I know we need to learn from mistakes and it's healthy to critically look at any error or tragedy, but let's be honest, the people in NASA are some pretty tremendous scientists, engineers, and managers and as far as I can see they are doing a pretty damn good job.
csh
Edward Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/ , a statistican and groundbreaking proponent of information visualization, has a very good illustration of what happened at the challenger disaster in his book "envisioning information", or maybe it was "Visual Explanations". i really can recommend his awesome books.
The really scary thing about NASA is that you could read (or listen to...gotta love the iPod) Feynman's piece on the Shuttle disaster and, with only a couple substututions, have a cogent commentary on either of the two shuttle disasters.
chris watts íë¦ìS ì(TM)ì
You are right, the temperature was below freezing that day. I know because I was at KSC and saw the launch in person. I'm from California and wasn't used to that kind of cold. I didn't have any gloves and got a minor case of frostbite on my fingers while trying to hold my camera. I remember stopping at a gas station on the way to KSC and I looked over at some nearby bushes and there were icicles hanging from them. It was probably the coldest weather I've ever experienced.
For me it was Tianemen Square (I was a student at the time watching it unfold on my small portable TV). I still can't look at a chinese person without thinking of it half the time.
Challenger didn't even phase me... it was just a rather spectacular traffic accident. Not on the radar, sorry.
You can't really say something affect 'an entire generation' without interviewing *everyone* from that generation (or at least a reasonably representative sample).
Humans in space is a "mankind" issue. A setback in space exploration has global meaning.
Speaking as a non-American, I can agree with the use of "international" here.
I was at home, getting ready for school. I had stopped for a moment to watch the launch with my parents.
When the shuttle came apart the first words that my father said were "It was too cold, the rings didn't seal right."
It was a haunting utterance, sort of under his breath as if he were talking to himself.
Dad's an Aero Engineer with a company that makes some of the analysis software that NASA and the manufacturers of the shuttle parts use to determine what happens to various objects under various stresses. He said rubber couldn't be properly analyzed as there are too many different variables going on with it at any given time. And as it chills all of it's properties change from fluid to solid or somewhere in between.
For my generation (I'm 34), I won't say this was our 9/11, but that this was our Kennedy.
9/11 belongs to my childrens generation.
The events that could have been avoided by NASA continued through because they were more concerned about the negative press from not making a launch date than they were about listening to an engineer say that there was a problem that needed to be addressed. I have been placed in this very position myself.
I worked for Martin Marietta and was put to work on analysis of the onboard fuel tanks for the Reaction Control System (RCS). The fuel tanks had to go through a process where they were welded together and could not be heat treated to relieve residual stresses after welding because of temperature sensative devices inside the tank. Analytically the residual stresses were beyond what was permissible for a pressure vessel and the life of the vessel was in question. Rather than resolve the questions that were raised, the management of the company fought with me about my conclusions and analysis. It turns out in the end that what I had predicted was true and the tanks were dangerous to pressurize. The reason that there was never a disaster was because the tanks were tested at cryogenic temperatures and went through a stress relief because of the testing.
There was more effort put into hiding previous analysis and predictions than there was on trying to understand what really happened. I believe that the Thiokol and NASA officials are responsible for the Challenger accident in whole.
Larry Vance Never Underestimate Your Influence!
Exactly. That reminds me of the joke in Armegeddon:
Which is a rip-off/homage of a joke I heard from Charlie Duke (don't know if it was his originally) about the Saturn V--something to the effect of "Then you realize you're sitting on top of something with the explosive potential of a small atomic bomb, that has hundreds of thousands of parts that all need to work perfectly--and it's all been built by the lowest bidder."
I once managed to deflect a corporate decision that seemed certain to lead to disaster by saying in a meeting with the CEO and other bigwigs "Guys, I'm having a Morton Thiokol moment, here." Enough of them got the reference (and saw that I meant it) that they actually started listening to me.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Or this guy covered on Slashdot, having exposed deadly defects in the new AIRBUS A380.
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For hs heroism, he and his family are now bankrupt, and he is facing jail in Austria
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/01/1
News Media Reports At
www.joe-mangan.com
Evidence at:
www.eaawatch.net
Looking through the article and several of the comments here, there doesn't seem to be much of a focus on the "big picture" lessons from the Challenger accident. There's a recent post Rand Simberg made at Transterrestrial Musings which sums up some of my own thoughts on the matter:
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http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/006406.h
It's twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA's confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn't severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.
Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it--they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.
But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn't be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it's childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn't that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.
This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)--that the American people won't accept the loss of astronauts. But we've shown throughout our history that we're willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA's goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.
Will the American people be inspired by that? I can't say--I only know that I am not.
Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we're going to get that from the current plan, or planners.