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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.'"
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
This is going to be incredibly insensitive torwards those lives that were lost...
If you are so sure, maybe you shouldn't say it. Right?
My 2: 17 may be a low number, but 3 is a much lower one, and you only needed to hear your engineers!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
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.
But when those losses could have been prevented had the people with authority not ignored those with operational knowledge then it really is unacceptable. If someone gets struck by a micro-meteor out in space or dies because of a serious failure after weeks of operation then yeah, that kind of thing can be considered the price of pioneering; the kind of stuff you just can't practically account for. Dying in an explosion seconds after launch from a fault that was detectable and warned against prior to launch is not.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
> 17 lives lost in the last 50 years of U.S. space exploration really is not too bad
Understand your reasoning but that's not the point here. Those lives and money were lost due to human negligence and pure bullheadedness. The loss was easily preventable.
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you only needed to hear your engineers!
you need information on the false positive rate for engineers' warnings before making such a statement.
You deserve to be modded down.
No, he doesn't. He deserves to have a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion posted in reply. I'm so sick of (-1, Disagree).
I actually agree that we are too cautious in our space explorations. We need to take more risks and spend more money.
But in this case, they were told exactly what would fail, why, and how. And they argued late into the night, and Boisjoly was so sure that he refused to watch the launch. There was absolutely no doubt in 5 engineers' minds that this would happen.
This was not an acceptable risk. It was easily avoidable. Not with 14 lives at stake. (The $5 billion ship might have been acceptable, though.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You deserve to be modded down.
No, he doesn't. He deserves to have a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion posted in reply. I'm so sick of (-1, Disagree).
One logical argument, coming right up: those deaths were entirely foreseeable and preventable. It's not like the deaths were a result of limitations of our knowledge, or an absolutely necessary sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. No, those deaths were because some idiotic bureaucrat couldn't be bothered to listen to qualified engineers. Far as I am concerned that guy should be 1) sued by the families for wrongful death and 2) tried for involuntary manslaughter.
Apparently legal action is the only thing that makes thick-headed organization-type bureaucrats wake up and take notice, cf. the insanity coming out of the public schools. No amount of logic or expertise or forewarning seems to have any effect on them.
And we've all learned something from that conversation, right? That's why we should be encouraging opinions that differ from ours, not encouraging moderators to silence them. It provokes good discussion.
If I predict disaster on every launch for this or that reason and post it on youtube (and delete the video it if there is no disaster), I might become famous on the one time that disaster strikes.
If he predicted disaster on every launch, you might have had a point. The article and subsequent investigation did not reveal such a fact. It seems that this was the only time he and his coworkers argued against a launch. When someone takes a stand against what they normally do, you should pay attention.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Still, this guy should have been taken somewhat seriously. He had over 20 years of experience, had been working at the company that developed the SRB's for several years, and was ignored even after showing his managers photographic evidence of damage being caused to the O-rings by cold weather with several of his colleagues on the team agreeing.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
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
Not really, because regardless of their false positive rate the evidence is what the evidence is.
Actually what you need is an eyes-wide-open, honest evaluation of the data, that isn't tainted by the interests of NASA or its subs or politicians who are have taken some positionon matters related to the above. And good luck with that.
If you read much Edward Tufte or attend one of his talks, he has a lot to say about the decision making processes for both the Challenger and Columbia incidents. I am dubious that an entire army of actual rocket scientists could have, of their own accord, made multiple data presentation choices that cast their employers in the best possible light. Laying out a graph that eventually helped a room full of smart people decide that the booster seals would be fine on the launch date. When those same data plotted differently showed an obvious direct correlation between failure and ambient temp and they were going to launch on the coldest day yet.
There is similar manipulating of the data from the Columbia.
People trying to serve some incidental interest, like preserving a contract or future funding, who are obviously cherry picking the information they share, aren't likely to be swayed by a low false positive rate. They made their decision long before they saw any evidence of anything anyway.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
You deserve to be modded down. Every life lost, that could have been avoided, is a disaster
This is nice rhetoric. At another level, we do actually make real trade offs involving how many deaths are acceptable. For example, banning personal cars would likely save lives. But we're not going to do it because their convenience is too high. Similarly, in the US many children die drowning in backyard pools. Banning such pools would make sense if all you care about is total deaths. But we're not going to do so, because the overall chance of death is pretty small in any given case. Lots of people also die from alcohol related issues even without counting those from drunk driving. Etc. Etc. It creates a lot of cognitive dissonance to acknowledge that we're actually ok with letting some people die, because we don't like to tell ourselves that we allow that sort of thing. But we're still going to make the tradeoffs.
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.
As you say, they are rocket scientists. Which means that when the rocket scientists say don't go, you don't go, because they are the goddam rocket scientists and no matter how "cool" your head is, you know less than them about rocket scientist. Yes, there are mismanaged agencies all over the world and all throughout history. However, when the military makes a poor decision, or the FDA, they at least have the defenses that their endeavors are risky to begin with, that they have responsibilities that at times conflict with careful procedure, and that their management requires the synthesis of varied data towards a relatively nebulous end. Space programs are feats of science and engineering, both of which are far more concrete in their aims and guidelines. If a research program in say, a university laboratory, experienced accidents on the scale of the challenger disaster, large inquiries would be launched, and the guilty parties or policies identified, rather than the "whoopsie!" reaction NASA seems to always give, which given that they were forewarned in this case is especially troubling.
While your exploration analogy appeals well to intuition, it is disingenuous insofar as space exploration is not a group of bold pioneers setting out with bowie knives and covered wagons, nor is it a capitalist enterprise where a few workers caught in the gears are considered acceptable losses: it is a careful and scientific exploration of human capability, and in such an exploration, care, more than speed or distance or results, is paramount. The Challenger disaster was a failed experiment, not in that it returned an unwelcome result, but that in it return no result of use. We now know that when you send humans into space with equipment you know to be faulty, there is a chance they will perish: how does that enrich our understanding? A failed exploration at least illuminates the conditions for failure; a slew of workplace accidents are unlikely to spoil the products of industry even as they illuminate no hazards. There was no illumination here, because the initial conditions were known, and led to the result we were almost certain to obtain. If a death happens, it happens. If a death happens, and it could have been prevented, but was not due to any concern which is ancillary to the central aim of the endeavor, is unforgiveable
This is going to be incredibly insensitive torwards those lives that were lost...
If you are so sure, maybe you shouldn't say it. Right?
He shouldn't keep quiet because he's insensitive. He should keep quiet because his argument is poorly thought out. It is not proper to compare human losses in other irrelevant or loosely related areas to losses in space exploration. The Challenger disaster simply would not have happened if the management had listened to the engineers. The Columbia disaster was caused by a known problem which they had always been lucky with before. Apollo 1 seems to have required several mistakes, including the flammable material in the cabin and the high-pressure O2 in an untested environment. It's clearly impossible to be perfect, but that doesn't mean you should just write off the resultant deaths, and ignore the lessons.
You don't work for a corporation where safety is first. You do not understand what process safety is. No one was pushing the boundaries of space by pushing O rings beyond their safety limits. This was a preventable accident. Your specious arguments don't prove otherwise.
There's no such thing as an accident. Everything has a cause. Unshielded electronics that shorts out in LEO? Not an accident. Mistake kilometers for miles and crash your probe into Mars? Not an accident. Lightning strike on takeoff? Not an accident- weather guy should have done his job. Launching your vehicle when it's so cold your O-rings get brittle and burn through the supports for your SRB? Not an accident. Foam-strike on liftoff that punches through the wing and causes the vehicle to break up on re-entry, when such foam strikes had been documented before? Not an accident.
The blame falls on the engineers- until the engineers raise a fuss and the management ignores it. Someone is always accountable. Always.
Sent from my CR-48
We are not talking about 17 lives in 50 years. We are talking about 3 human lives lost during the entire 17 year Mercury, Gemini and Apollo eras with 0 lost during actual flight versus the 25 year shuttle era that lost 2 of the 4 shuttles with 14 crew in 50 flights. The problem is NASA spacecraft should be getting safer, less expensive and more reliable and instead were getting more expensive and less reliable and less safe. Project Constellation was more of the same with senators putting safety considerations secondary to contracts for their home districts.
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.
To the Offtopic mod... the connection to topic is that the "acceptable risk" reference above was talking about the last age of exploration. There were high risks taken during the last age of exploration, but they were more acceptable mostly because the risk takers went out of sight and either returned triumphantly or didn't return at all. Even those who returned with tales of horror were relating stories of events that happened months ago, out of sight and largely unimaginable to the listener.
Live TV puts the situation right in everyone's face, immediate, real, and something they can empathize with. People watching Challenger blow felt the explosion themselves. It makes the risk less acceptable.
Live TV cut popular support out from under the Vietnam War - it was no more gruesome than WWII or WWI, but it was wholly less acceptable to the voting public - for many reasons of course, but having the war brought live to your living room has a way of making it just a little more important to your decision making processes.
When the complaint is theoretical, yeah sure. When your engineers are complaining about frozen O-rings and are showing you video of O-rings spitting fire, or when your engineers are complaining about foam shedding from the fuel tank and have numerous videos of that exact occurrence happening, that's different.
Sent from my CR-48
For the record, I don't believe YOUR post deserves to be modded down, either. I'm sorry to see that it's been done, and I fear it might have been induced by my reply.
In my opinion, Flamebait and Troll are actions of intention. When I moderate down, I try to discern the intention of the poster -- were they attempting to incite something? Did they or should they have known better? Even if they were trying to incite something, do they have a legitimate point that CAN be replied to in an informative way?
Of course, more often I more try to find a good point-counterpoint thread and upmod both sides.
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.
I remember that after Apollo 11, it was said that the American space program had cost 8 lives. The figure comes from a Time-Life audio documentary entitled "To the Moon" that I listened to dozens of times as a kid, and I feel absolutely certain that was the number used, though I don't know what that would refer to beyond Apollo 1 . That would bring the total for fifty years up to 23. Here's wikipedia's list of space program accidents, including non-fatalities and Russian accidents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
You overlook the fact that, as a result of the Challenger accident, the Shuttle program was severly damaged. Prior to Challenger it was an aggressive program pushing boundaries, afterward it become conservative, limited and cautious. In the wake of Columbia it was crippled, and was relegated to almost the bare essential missions needed to finish and support the ISS. The Air Force largely abandoned the Shuttle and returned to expendable launchers, though many think they wanted to do that anyway and Challenger was just a convenient excuse.
Shuttles were also different than expendable launchers. They were very limited in number, expensive and difficult to build especially after the assembly line had shut down so you couldn't afford to lose any of them without damaging the whole program.
The loss of life aside, the consequences of the twin disasters were the entire program was wrecked, the U.S. manned spaced program was crippled, may never recover at NASA, and it was all preventable and unnecessary. At this point companies like SpaceX are probably the only hope for a recovery because they are culturally free of most of the problems afflicting NASA's culture. To be successful in a technology intensive endeavor like space exploration engineers need to have a dominant voice in the program. Their voice can't be drowned out by bureaucrats and program managers with insufficient regard for the engineering.
@de_machina
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.
This is why management has no business in risk analysis. Management needs to stick to risk *reporting* and decision making based on a proper risk assessment carried out by engineers ESPECIALLY when lives and billions in equipment are on the line. You are really just saying the same thing as the parent post, except that it is somehow acceptable (or at the very least understandable!) that, managers are making poor risk assessments. It's neither acceptable nor excusable.
It's an awful strawman to point out that hindsight is always 20-20. Of course it is!
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Nova did a program about the Columbia investigation. After running through the possibilities, the team finally sat down and worked out the expected velocities and forces involved with an impact with the foam debris. Nobody believed that foam could do any real damage so they finally tracked down a spare wing section and shot a piece of foam at it. The video is pretty damning and now it all seems so obvious. However, I got the impression that beforehand even the engineers had put this one in the acceptible risk column.
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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