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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.'"
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?
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
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.
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).
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.