After listening to tapes of the trials, interviews, reading transcripts, and reading articles it was very apparent to me that this was a failure of management. The lead engineer, during the discussions of whether to launch the night before, was arguing that the engineering evidence did not support a launch under the temperature conditions projected for the following morning. He was told by Morton-Thiokol business reps to "take off your engineer hat, and put on your manager hat".
Evidence points to this failure happening because NASA needed a PR boost for funding, and M.T. wanted to continue doing business with them delivering solid-state boosters.
Because Roger Boisjoly spoke to Congress during the hearings he was black-listed from his industry. At no point during the decisions leading up to that disaster did good engineering practices that could have prevented this destruction come into play.
> The system failed. People failed. But we knew this would happen, and we did it anyway because it's the price of exploring the frontiers. ... you might say the bloated organization and government involvement makes this sort of thing inevitable. But I bet the small privateers exploring manned space flight will run into their own challenges.
I bet they will do better, and go farther. They will know a disaster like that will likely ruin their company, so they will make damn sure that the communication process between managers and engineers doesn't break down, and that the process complexity is kept in check.
You're describing (and excusing) a bloated and dysfunctional system that sprang up around the need to manage the complexity of the space shuttle. People tried to fix the organization after Challenger, but the fact that Linda Ham stopped the request for imagery as described by CAIB shows that they failed or it reverted. And as your attitude shows, there is a bit of a fatalist perspective ("bloated organization and government involvement"). In the long term, it has to be fixed, or stuff will keep blowing up.
Some day, NASA will likely be seen as strange and primitive. That insanely high risk of death is the current state of the art, however. It will get worked out of the system over a very long period of time - but only if we don't lose the nerve to launch these things because someone might die.
How many people died crossing oceans back in the day because someone screwed up? Shit - they still die on ships, and in cars and in planes. Space ships are going to blow up, crash, and fail. It's just life.
It's not a totally fair comparison to say "Boeing can do it, why can't NASA and their contractors"
With current technology, it seems obvious that if we want to (further) develop manned spaceflight, we should launch unmanned orbiters with crash-test dummies and telepresence surrogates, and keep doing so until we've established a safety record.
This is the question I've always had about the Challenger, but never heard addressed: How much of a factor was the crew's opinion considered to be? I strongly suspect that the astronauts themselves exerted informal but real pressure to prefer flying, since it would be their moment in the sun.
I did work on astronaut EVA training, however. In that case, the astronauts were king. No matter how silly the request, their wishes were catered to - but only in areas of usability, not safety. It turns out it's really difficult to connect wires in space, for example - small things matter a lot. I can remember at least one case where what they wanted was just plain dumb. But we did it anyway. Usually, though, they were pretty good about that sort of stuff.
Do you believe that we'd be better served by simpler (but potentially much more dangerous) craft flown by private industry? If not, why is the NASA approach better, seeing as how it is mired in both politic from without and bureaucracy/process from within?
Hell, even 20-50% safety isn't necessarily a productive strategy, if you pay too much for it.
I think the main trick is to reduce the unit cost/training investment in astronauts so that we can send up more, and making very cheap vehicles to get them there, so that we'll not have to worry about losing a big investment when (not if) something goes wrong. Putting hundreds of millions of trained meat into billions of dollars worth of aerospace tech is not sustainable.
If it would get me to the moon with a 1 in 3 chance, hell, give me a banana and call me Albert VII.
Space shuttles exploding will definitely kill people.
We're human. Fellow humans died in this pursuit of space exploration. Is it inevitable? Maybe. Probably.
Does it still hurt? Hell yes.
Space shuttles exploding will definitely kill people."
Don't make such a big jump from the first to the second. You could have also said, "Extreme space exploration risk might or might not kill people." Fact is, in both finances and space exploration, in rare cases it has led to the death of those involved (directly or indirectly). But those cases are rare and the rewards are so great, and so we press on.
When the person making the rules (the government) is no longer subject to the rules, but held responsible when they're broken, do you think they'll get looser or stricter?
And now not only does your company have to obey safety laws or whatever else applies, you've got insurance companies, shareholder lawsuits, and so on.
The Challenger/Columbia astronauts are (correctly) treated as heroes who sacrificed for the greater good. The Space Inc. astronauts who die will be considered victims of corporate negligence.
Loosing 7 lives is a tragedy. For the CEO, knowing loosing those lives will cost the company everything, they are going to pay more attention to safety, than a government bureaucracy.
In a sense, every shuttle was an X-plane - it was as much a research vehicle as a commercial transport to LEO. One builds shuttles to learn how to better build shuttles and, in order to do that, learn as much as possible.
BTW, I envy you (in a good way, of course) more than a little. Working for NASA is a really cool thing.
My view is that even if the crew were doomed, gathering additional information in advance of reentry would have allowed for a better understanding of circumstances, better post-disaster modeling of what went wrong and how the orbiter failed (both in the launch-time foam strike, and in the reentry heat-shield penetration and structural failure).
Whether or not to inform the crew is yet another decision. Astronauts are aware that theirs is a highly risky venture, though with a low sample size, the specific odds are somewhat uncertain, though on the order of 4:100 per human space flight. If you're going to go on a space mission, you'd better be prepared to die.
If NASA refrained from assessing strike damage on those grounds, I feel a grave error was committed.
What would really be interesting is why he "failed to make his case" according to executives.
Due to the short timescale to build their presentation, they re-used info from existing presentations. Unfortunately, the same info had previously been used to demonstrate why their o-rings were safe. The NASA people basically said, 'last time you showed me this graph it meant things were safe, this time it means things are dangerous. What gives?'
The decision makers were looking for excuses to move forward, and that gave them an excuse to ignore the warnings.
It just goes to show you that even when everyone is paying attention, things still go wrong. Some people heard him and made the call that it was still safe. They were wrong. That, unfortunately, is the state of the art today (or it was back in the 80's). The alternative is to stay on the ground.
But yes, shit does happen, and nobody climbing abord the orbiter is under any illusion that it is a safe thing to do.
Nobody is forced into an orbiter - people BEG for the opportunity. We gave them that opportunity, working in good faith to the best of our ability. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes things break. Sometimes people screw up. We all know the risks.
You can sit on the porch with a near 100% safety record or you can give it a try. Your choice.
What I cannot understand is: an unknown, unforseen contingency is a completely different thing than an engineer pointing out "this WILL fail, it will blow up and I have proof" and there really should not be any excuse for ignoring a warning like this... yes, you cannot make it 100% safe but you should at least aim to make it as safe as humanly possible given your current level of technology and knowledge... so, in my book overriding an engineer saying "this WILL fail and it'll blow up" is actually negligent man slaughter. When I get into my car in the morning and don't care that the brakes aren't working even my mechanic told me my brake lines were cut, what would you call that?
At the end of the day, if even ONE person demonstrates scientific or engineering knowledge that shows a serious safety concern, then why would you actively choose to ignore it. Period.
NASA management - whether it be by organisational process and or personally identifiable decision making - failed in their responsibilities in spectacular fashion!
I do not believe that if someone knew with 100% certainty that Challenger would blow up that it would ever have launched. The trouble came in in the judgment of that risk. In this case, from what I've read, they got it wrong - very wrong[1].
You can argue about how certain they have to be, or how negligent people were to ignore estimated failure probabilities of whatever magnitude. But it's not like someone says, "this will blow up 85% of the time, period. Make a call." It's more subtle, complex, and less concrete than that.
1. Note that this is not equavlent to "if it blew up, they got it wrong.". Sometimes the small, properly calculated risk blows up on you just because you're unlucky - which is different from a miscalculated risk blowing up on you.
O-rings are supposed to seal on compression, not expansion.
As it is now, the O-rings are getting blown out of their tracks but still managing to seal the whole assembly quickly enough.
The above unplanned behavior, which is the only thing preventing a hull loss (and a crew loss since there's no provision for escape) is sufficiently iffy that sooner or later we're likely to run out of luck.
(I'd also add about the Columbia loss that NASA had a "can't do" attitude towards the problem they observed of the foam hitting the wing. Hardly a "crew first" attitude.)
When I visit a NASA center, there are posters up all over saying "If it's not safe, say so." Part of the reason for the 2-year grounding of the Shuttle fleet, post-Challenger, was to put in place a stronger culture of safety at NASA.
A commenter mentioned the false dichotomy of "engineers vs. managers". It's a hard call, as an engineer, to disappoint a manager (or a whole line of managers, all the way up) with a call to solve a possible problem. Civil engineers may be more used to this sort of accountability.
While I don't know the people involved with Challenger - I was in 6th grade at the time - it goes well against my own experience that NASA management had anything but the interests of the crew in mind. To a fault. In fact, your average NASA employee doted on astronauts like a star struck little girl. What the crew wanted, the crew got. You could always tell who the astronaut was when you saw a group walking about the centers - he/she was the one whose every semi-whimsical comment extracted voluminous and polite laughter from the others in the group.
I was, however, working when Columbia blew up. In fact, my mission was supposed to fly on it when it got back. Although sad, I feel comfortable saying that most of the people working on these things sort of know it's going to happen from time to time. It wasn't exactly surprising to us or the crew.
Blaming managers and celebrating engineers is overly simplistic. The line is not as well defined as you might think. I had few - if any (I can't think of a single one, actually) - managers (either contractors or NASA employees) who were not experienced engineers.
The safety rules for a shuttle payload, let alone the actual orbiter, are voluminous and arcane. It is the primary reason that very little new technology comes out of the manned space flight program. Everything new is considered too dangerous because it hasn't been flown before.
This stuff is insanely dangerous. It is pretty damn easy to come up with a way some piece of hardware you're working on could kill someone. The complexity is enormous. The number of people involved is in the thousands, and they're spread all over the country. Different centers have different rules.
As a result, you make life-and-death decisions literally every day. It's not such a big deal, because there is a lot of formal process in place to make sure it gets done right. The the "standards" are what keep space flight as we know it as safe as it is. Are they or the processes by which they are enforced perfect? Hell no.
The system failed. People failed. But we knew this would happen, and we did it anyway because it's the price of exploring the frontiers. We learned from Challenger. We learned from Columbia. We will learn from the next catastrophic failure. NASA isn't perfect. In fact, you might say the bloated organization and government involvement makes this sort of thing inevitable. But I bet the small privateers exploring manned space flight will run into their own challenges.
Basically, what I'm saying is that we need to keep this in a larger perspective. Obsessing over one failure in what is a centuries-long quest is not helpful. Dissect it, learn from it, and move on.