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Robert Boisjoly Dies At 73, the Engineer Who Tried To Stop the Challenger Launch
demachina writes "Robert Boisjoly has died at the age of 73. Boisjoly, Allan J. McDonald and three others argued through the night of 27 January, 1986 to stop the following day's Challenger launch, but Joseph Kilminster, their boss at Morton Thiokol, overruled them. NASA managers didn't listen to the engineers. Both Boisjoly and McDonald were blackballed for speaking out. NASA's mismanagement 'is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel,' Boisjoly said after the 2003 Columbia disaster. 'I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.'"
They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.
(This is going to be incredibly insensitive torwards those lives that were lost, but it has to be said.) 17 lives lost in the last 50 years of U.S. space exploration really is not too bad considering how many lives where lost during other times of exploration, pioneering eras and the building of industry. I think NASA tries to be perfect and after all they are rocket scientists, but to assume that NASA is the only place that has mismanagement is incredibly naive. Look at the rest of government. Look at the military. Look at the FDA for crying out loud. Am I saying that you should have deaths? No, what I'm saying is that you need to have a little perspective. Only 17 lives lost in 50 years means that you're at least doing something right to safeguard all the other lives that you saved through careful proceedure and cool heads.
It's *Roger* Boisjoly, like TFA says.
Perhaps he should be nominated for the not-yet existing Bradley Manning prize for integrity in the face of overwhelming odds.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
When an engineer says don't go with the launch. Sorry but just stfu and listen to him. FFS, he's not the idiot citizen who doesn't know squat. He's an engineer and 3 of them argued...wow. And the management still didn't listen. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth. On top of that, I'm not an american and I'm very touched by this story, news and especially those lost lives. All of that could of been avoided and they would still learned from their mistake, corrected the problem and go forward with the launch later. My question is: what happened to the guy who still said let's go with the launch ? Did he get accused of murder ?
Look kid, it's not a case of always doing things right. It was a case of people coming in that were not doing things right and as a consequence getting others killed. The Russians had that problem as well, for instance an idiot in charge of a project forcing people to take stupid shortcuts at gunpoint and getting hundreds killed in an explosion. Yes, bad management happens a lot but that's no excuse not to put projects with severe consequences of failure under adult supervision instead of some horse judge that has powerful friends.
Both Boisjoly and McDonald were blackballed for speaking out.
I think that's the bigger issue here. NASA really hasn't changed, they're the same arrogant, top heavy, risk adverse organization they bloated into during the 80's. You'd think they would have been humbled by seeing heavy lift moved over to the Russians, but it hasn't dented their attitude one bit.
It's not the lives that were lost, it was the circumstances surrounding the loss and the general lack of accountability afterwards. Engineers who try to sound warnings still will get blackballed. Nothing really changes when you have the problem dictating the solution.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
From the 1987 LA Times article:
And for that, there was an additional private cost: resentment on the part of those who had been hoping to avoid, at least in part, official blame. It came from corporate executives, and from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Morton Thiokol's biggest customer. And it came from colleagues fearful that too much exposure of truth might hurt business and cost them their jobs.
"If you wreck this company, I'm gonna put my kids on your doorstep," grumbled one. Someone finally dubbed the engineers "the five lepers."
This is the sad reality: Whistle-blowers are often the target of ostracism from their contemporaries, while usually unanimously admired later in historical context. It's still not easy to be a whistle-blower, if anything, it's harder than ever.
When the bids went out to professional engineers in the aerospace seal business, my friend, now gone sadly, was asked to bid on the large O'Ring seal design for the shuttle booster rockets.
He did his basic expansion calculations on what temperature changes would do to the large diameter structure and came to the conclusion it would not work and replied declining to quote with a note that it didn't seem to be workable because of basic physics.
Rudolph's opinion was never seriously taken and we know the result.
I prefer to remember him as the cool guest lecturer and advisor we had at Weber State for the NUSAT program. Keen intellect, razor sharp, and driven. There's more to the man than just Challenger.
Here is some perspective. The question is how many of these types of warnings are issued every flight? It's very similar to when environmental groups oppose every development project. If you go out every time warning of disaster eventually a disaster happens and you are proven right. But what is the alternative? To never build? To never fly?
Anyone who has ever designed anything critical always has a feeling they may have missed something. There is a phase called analysis paralysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis) . It is when you never do something because you are always checking another scenario in which it may fail.
Whenever any complex system fails there will always be a record of someone warning about it because that is what engineers do. In fact it is obvious after the fact. We always think of ways something can fail. But with limited time and limited budget we can't follow all of those lines of thought to their conclusion. You have to prioritize the risks and accept them to get things done.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
All of the Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the O rings were telling them to stop, they new the O rings had issues with cold temperatures. It was an anomolously cold day in Florida. It almost never freezes at Kennedy but that morning there was ice all over the launch pad. Even setting the O rings aside it was enormously foolish to launch that morning and it was pretty obvious they should postpone a day until temperatures weren't aberrant.
As I recall Reagan was giving a speech about the space program and timing it to coincide with the launch and the teacher-in-space and the bureaucrats were unwisely feeling political pressure to launch with all engineering and safety factors screamed for them to stop.
@de_machina
I was working for a large, not directly tech related (though they do some research) Federal Agency last year and the word came down that the "Chief" (the highest ranking civil servant, not appointee) was unwilling to kill more people. We had a work stoppage, training classes etc. And the attitude of "Well, adjusted for man-hours of work we kill fewer people than other agencies." was unacceptable. He claimed he was tired of flying out fro D.C to attend funerals.
So we did training classes and any employee is now supposed to be able to cry "Stop!" when something starts to get too hazardous without consequences. During the classes employees who tried to use the argument "Well, adjusted for man-hours of work we kill fewer people than other agencies." were "hammered" for missing the point. *The point is a culture of safety where one loss is unacceptable.*
I find that sane and sensible.
Will it work? Who knows. It will probably take a few years to find out.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Because it was Larry Mulloy and Jerald Mason. From http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/shuttle/shuttle1.htm
Marshall's Solid Rocket Booster Project Manager, Larry Mulloy, commented that the data was inconclusive and challenged the engineers' logic. A heated debate went on for several minutes before Mulloy bypassed Lund and asked Joe Kilminster for his opinion. Kilminster was in management, although he had an extensive engineering background. By bypassing the engineers, Mulloy was calling for a middle-management decision, but Kilminster stood by his engineers. Several other managers at Marshall expressed their doubts about the recommendations, and finally Kilminster asked for a meeting off of the net, so Thiokol could review its data. Boisjoly and Thompson tried to convince their senior managers to stay with their original decision not to launch. A senior executive at Thiokol, Jerald Mason, commented that a management decision was required. The managers seemed to believe the O-rings could be eroded up to one third of their diameter and still seat properly, regardless of the temperature. The data presented to them showed no correlation between temperature and the blow-by gasses which eroded the O-rings in previous missions. According to testimony by Kilminster and Boisjoly, Mason finally turned to Bob Lund and said, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." Joe Kilminster wrote out the new recommendation and went back on line with the teleconference. The new recommendation stated that the cold was still a safety concern, but their people had found that the original data was indeed inconclusive and their "engineering assessment" was that launch was recommended, even though the engineers had no part in writing the new recommendation and refused to sign it. Alan McDonald, who was present with NASA management in Florida, was surprised to see the recommendation to launch and appealed to NASA management not to launch. NASA managers decided to approve the boosters for launch despite the fact that the predicted launch temperature was outside of their operational specifications.
When I was in 4th Grade, I had the good fortune to meet Boisjoly and a couple of other engineers from Thiokol. It wasn't like meeting a national celebrity or anything because I grew up in Brigham City, Utah, which is close enough to Thiokol that you can see the smoke plumes from booster tests rise up over the western mountains.
At my school, a group of fellow students and I had the opportunity to hold a demo model o-ring just like the ones used to join the booster segments. These demo units were just the ones that didn't pass muster for actual use. The group and I held one o-ring spread out in a full circle and nearly covered the entire floor of the classroom. They're huge and didn't feel like the household o-rings I was used to. I could definitely see something like that getting stiff or brittle at low temperatures. My memory is hazy, but I'd almost compare it to a Neoprene type feel.
I mentioned Challenger and how I learned about the o-rings (my grandpa, who also got me started in Electronics, told me about it). The engineers seemed surprised that a ten year old kid would know, let alone care, about that kind of thing.
Among the other visual aids the engineers brought, there was a piece of spongy SRB fuel with a couple of ingredients missing so as to make it inert. It was Boisjoly who calmed me down after I was angry with myself for breaking the piece in half while checking the flexibility of the material to see just how sponge-like it was.
For years after that, while still living in Brigham City, I got to see booster segments passing through town (can't take the freeway) on the way to Thiokol (now ATK) on the back of massive semi trailers with police escorts and utility workers leading the pack with tall poles on the front of their work trucks to make sure the lines over the roads would physically clear the booster and then holding the wires out of the way if there wasn't enough clearance. I always thought back to holding that o-ring and how truly massive it was.
I only ever saw one booster test and that was back in 2003. The dead-silence for the first few seconds (speed of sound, you know?) is eerie. After that, even from over a mile away, the noise hits you like a freight train. Those o-rings are charged with holding back a truly ridiculous amount of force.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Note that this message didn't actually get to NASA. Morton Thiokol engineers told their management that they should delay the launch. The report from Morton Thiokol management to NASA, however, said that the launch should be no different from previous (successful) launches.
Probably because he would have been instantly fired. Keeping your kids fed and housed is probably more important than seven strangers. Cold, yes, but also true.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Before you spout off about the ET insulation foam having been reformulated without CFCs, try reading the CAIB report (volume 1, Page 51), which specifically states that the portion of the foam that broke loose was the OLD CFC-based formulation.
http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/pdf/vol1/full/caib_report_volume1.pdf
The story about the reformulated foam causing the Columbia accident is largely the doing of Rush Limbaugh, who seized on a lie from one of his typically ill-informed listeners, and kept repeating it until it became accepted as fact by everyone on the right.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200508090007
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