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.

Comments

Sad.

[Anonymous Coward]

RIP Mr. Ebeling.

A tragedy that did not have to happen because "sales and marketing" ignored the engineer with the technical knowhow.

Re:Sad.

[Lisandro]

NASA had to launch in order to keep to their promised schedule (which was already stretched several times before the incident) in order not to lose funding. Someone made the call to consider the freezing an acceptable risk and launch even with several warnings not to do so.

There was a a "product" and a "sale".

Re:Sad.

[gstoddart]

Well, then it's the next batch of cluprits ... PR and management. Which I gather in this case is exactly what happened.

The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.

That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up."

When Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, Ebeling and his colleagues sat stunned in a conference room at Thiokol's headquarters outside Brigham City, Utah. They watched the spacecraft explode on a giant television screen and they knew exactly what had happened.

Three weeks later, Ebeling and another engineer separately and anonymously detailed to NPR the first account of that contentious pre-launch meeting. Both were despondent and in tears as they described hours of data review and arguments. The data showed that the rubber seals on the shuttle's booster rockets wouldn't seal properly in cold temperatures and this would be the coldest launch ever.

What's really sad is this poor bastard did everything he could to avert it, and got told to STFU.

It's sad that he carried guilt for something he properly identified and did everything he could to prevent it.

"I think that was one of the mistakes that God made," Ebeling says softly. "He shouldn't have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me. You picked a loser.' "

No sir, that's not how the rest of us interpret that.

Re:Sad.

[__aaclcg7560]

There was a a "product" and a "sale".

The product was the first teacher in space. The sale was the State of the Union address by President Ronald Reagan. According to various reports, Reagan wanted to chat with her while she was in orbit on national television. NASA and the administration categorically denied that the launch was tied to the speech.

Re:Sad.

[thinkwaitfast]

Says someone who didn't read the Rogers Commission Report including Feynman's addendum where NASA actually believed their own (completely made up) hype about 1 loss per 100,000 missions.

Note also that the exact same causes were also listed as contributing factors in the loss of the Columbia.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." ... Richard Feynman

Re:Sad.

[Solandri]

How NASA came up with the 1 loss per 100,000 figure is a great lesson in misapplied statistics. Most of that risk was due to O-ring failure. Mating the segments of the SRBs was a difficult task, and inspection of the SRBs after test firings showed that something like 1 in 50 O-rings sealing the joint was failing (burning through). This was correctly deemed unacceptable. NASA's "solution" was to put in 3 O-rings at each joint. That triple redundancy meant that the chance of a complete burn-through (failure of all three O-rings) was 1 in 50*50*50 = 1 in 125,000. Presto! You've taken a system with unacceptably high risk, and through the clever use of statistics turned it into something reliable.

Unfortunately, that math only works when the failures are independent events. When a common event compromises all three O-rings - like cold weather - they all fail together and your redundancy offers no additional protection.

The same thing happened at Fukushima. They knew the nuclear plant would need diesel generators for backup power in an emergency. Diesel generators can be finicky to start, especially if they haven't been usd much for years. So they added redundancy by installing multiple generators - 2 per reactor, plus a switching station which would allow them to shunt power from any generator to any reactor. 12 diesel generators in all for the plant.

Again, that assumes the diesel generator failures are independent events. A common event (flooding from a tsunami) wiped out all but 2 of the generators, and those 2 (in another reactor further up the hill that had been shut down for maintenance) were useless because the flooding also wiped out the switching station.

When you took Intro to Statistics the book said to get the overall probability, you multiply probabilities for independent events. That little bit at the end there is really important.

Re:Sad.

[Grishnakh]

The thing that really bothers me is that these whistleblower engineers have Wikipedia pages about them, they're listed by name in discussions or articles (including Wikipedia) about the disaster, etc.

But where is the list of names of the managers who were *directly responsible for the deaths of the Challenger crew*? These people are guilty of **murder**. Yet we never see their names anywhere, they're just referred to as anonymous "managers".

Why is this? These murderers should be publicly listed and shamed for the scum that they are.

Re:Sad.

[ShanghaiBill]

They were shipped long distance by train so that they could be manufactured in the district of someone important to funding.

That "someone" was Senator Jake Garn of Utah, who chaired the appropriation committee for NASA's funding. He not only had the SRBs made in Utah, but he also got himself a ride on the Space Shuttle at a cost of tens of million to the taxpayers, despite being completely unqualified and spending near all his time in space puking from motion sickness.

Make the SRBs on-site and avoid the need for O-rings entirely.

They did not have to be made on-site. They could have been made in a single piece anywhere on the east or gulf coast and moved to the launch site by barge using the Intercoastal Waterway. That was the original plan, before Senator Garn used his chairmanship to have construction shifted to Utah, increasing the cost, and decreasing the structural integrity.

I remember this as a child

[holophrastic]

I was 6 years old, and interested in space tech. I became very aware of what had happened, and it shaped my life. I learned a valuable lesson from Bob.

The lesson I learned wasn't to listen to warnings, or to double-check things. The lesson I learned was to stand my ground through escalation.

Bob did his job. And had he been a psychopath, he could have been happy with what he did. But that's not me -- because of these events.

In my case, yes I'd have grabbed my hunting rifle. But I wouldn't have walked into NASA offices with it. You don't believe me that it's going to blow up from the cold, fine. Bang. Now it's going to blow up from that hole that I just shot into it.

I've followed this lesson quite a few times in my career, and in my life. Being willing to sabotage my own interests (clients, projects, money, property, relationships) in order to do what I strongly believed was the right thing has ensured that I sleep really damned well, each and every night.

Thank you Bob, for giving me the lesson that would shape much of my life.

And yet on the flip side...

[DumbSwede]

The world is full of people that are sure in their minds they are right and will do whatever it takes to stand up for their beliefs.
The suicide bomber in Brussels I'm sure was convinced he had rightful justification for his actions.

Escalate, yes,
Fight the system, yes.
Commit dangerous, illegal, criminal acts in defence of your beliefs, NO.

Not everyone can be IN CHARGE. While there are many bad outcomes from following the chain of command, on average it is probably better than the anarchy that would reign without it.

Perhaps you are engaging in hyperbole with your rifle example, but do you really want every halfwit in our country destroying things to back up their beliefs, because they "KNOW" they are right?