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Bob Ebeling, Challenger Engineer Who Forewarned of Shuttle Disaster, Dead At 89 (huffingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from HuffingtonPost: For three decades, retired NASA engineer Bob Ebeling blamed himself for being unable to stop the 1986 launch of space shuttle Challenger. He had warned that the shuttle might explode, and it did shortly after liftoff, killing seven crew members. Ebeling was one of five engineers at a NASA contractor then called Morton Thiokol who warned the space agency that cold temperatures predicated at the time of the launch could prove disastrous. The warning was ignored. The night before the launch, Ebeling reportedly told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up." He told another daughter, Kathy Ebeling, that he had toyed with the idea of bringing his hunting rifle to work to threaten NASA not to launch, according to an article last month in The Washington Post. In the final weeks of his life, however, thanks to an outpouring of support following a National Public Radio story in January on the 30th anniversary of the disaster, Ebeling, 89, finally found peace. Ebeling died Monday in his home in Brigham City, Utah, after a prolonged illness with prostate cancer, NPR reported.
Not only did they ignore the warnings, in some cases they directly ignored the protections in place to protect against unsafe launches. A few years back, I had the privilege of being seated next to Roger Boisjoly, another of the Morton Thiokol whistleblowers, who was to be a guest lecturer for 650 engineering ethics students at Texas A&M University the following day. It was fascinating to hear him describe his firsthand account of the conference calls and back-and-forth taking place the night before the disaster.
From what I recall of what he said, prior to every launch, NASA required that Morton Thiokol engineers sign off on their systems, and one of those sign-offs fell to him, but he refused to sign anything due to the concerns he had about the O-ring in cold temperatures. While Morton Thiokol management tried to convince him to change his mind, they were on a conference call with NASA, who was asking what the delay was about. Morton Thiokol management played it off as a minor issue on their end that was being worked out (i.e. "He's driving into the office right now...just give us a minute" sort of stuff). When they were unable to convince him to sign it, his non-engineer manager relieved him of duty and signed-off on the launch himself, completely contrary to protocol.
NASA accepted it regardless of that fact, and the rest is history.