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Challenger Tragedy - In Depth, and Deeply Felt
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jan 28, 2006 08:34 PM
from the /salute dept.
from the /salute dept.
Patchw0rk F0g writes "On this, the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, Jay Barbree has a moving and in-depth piece on this international disaster." From the article: "During several earlier shuttle missions, disaster did everything it could to crawl into the shuttle launch system and turn it into tumbling flaming wreckage. The primary O-rings on those flights suffered severe erosion from superheated gases, sometimes accompanied by lesser erosion. And the erosion had occurred after launch temperatures much higher than on this freezing Florida day -- 53 degrees was the lowest launch-time temperature up to that time. The booster engineers felt helpless. For months, they had been studying the O-ring seal problem. They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'"
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"international disaster" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"international disaster" (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the ever-so-impartial wording implying that they should have been able to see it coming. It's easy to talk like that afterwards but obviously they did not know or it wouldn't have happened. People who write this kind of journalistic sensationalism by exploiting human tragedy disgust me.
Parent
Re:"international disaster" (Score:3, Funny)
This is one of the problems..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is one of the problems..... (Score:5, Insightful)
People will complain no matter how NASA runs things, I say give them a bigger budget than the measly amount they get now and see what they can do with it.
And yes, 16 billion is measly when you consider that it seems sometimes like they're our NIH for everything not health-related; that is, they have a finger in every stewing "pot" of research.
Parent
Re:This is one of the problems..... (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly. That reminds me of the joke in Armegeddon:
Rockhound: "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"
Parent
Re:This is one of the problems..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is a rip-off/homage of a joke I heard from Charlie Duke (don't know if it was his originally) about the Saturn V--something to the effect of "Then you realize you're sitting on top of something with the explosive potential of a small atomic bomb, that has hundreds of thousands of parts that all need to work perfectly--and it's all been built by the lowest bidder."
Parent
I remember exactly where I was... (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose I'll remember those last words
"Go at throttle up"
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688158927/sr=1-
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:3, Funny)
I am running, I am running and dodging, I am runnning, dodging and ducking... it ain't easy in this nomex suit.
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:5, Insightful)
And although the last words on the black box might have been "uh, oh", the last words heard over the air were: "Go for 104 percent".
Then there was this horrible "Snick!" as the radio went dead.
There's a sample of the last sounds from the shuttle on this song [ackley.net].
I saw Richard Feynman's eloquent demonstration of why the boosters failed, and watched him be ignored by the other members of the commission. I learned of the group of engineers at Thiokol that were overrulled by their management to give the "Go" to this mission...
I visualize these moments in time every time I am given management directives that attempt to contravene physical law, and to this day I stay true to my profession as an engineer, and do the right thing by the physics. It's the only way I can sleep at night.
Still, I remain haunted.
Parent
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:5, Interesting)
When the shuttle came apart the first words that my father said were "It was too cold, the rings didn't seal right."
It was a haunting utterance, sort of under his breath as if he were talking to himself.
Dad's an Aero Engineer with a company that makes some of the analysis software that NASA and the manufacturers of the shuttle parts use to determine what happens to various objects under various stresses. He said rubber couldn't be properly analyzed as there are too many different variables going on with it at any given time. And as it chills all of it's properties change from fluid to solid or somewhere in between.
For my generation (I'm 34), I won't say this was our 9/11, but that this was our Kennedy.
9/11 belongs to my childrens generation.
Parent
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is asinine.
-Gen X
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Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:5, Insightful)
Challenger was Challenger.
The two aren't similar in any way, shape or form, except that people who shouldn't have died, did.
Parent
Re:I remember exactly where I was... (Score:4, Interesting)
Challenger didn't even phase me... it was just a rather spectacular traffic accident. Not on the radar, sorry.
You can't really say something affect 'an entire generation' without interviewing *everyone* from that generation (or at least a reasonably representative sample).
Parent
Feynman's account (Score:4, Informative)
Feynman was by far one of the greatest minds of our time. Too bad he died fairly young (70 years), he still had a good 10 or 20 years of time to contribute to human knowledge.
The Launch Escape System. (Score:5, Informative)
The 'big step' taken moving from the Saturn V launcher to the Shuttle for manned flight was not just moving from expendable to [partially] re-usable vehicles but the total reliance in the new vehicle for launch safety.
If practically *anything* were to go wrong during the launch of a Shuttle, it would be curtains for the vehicle and crew whereas the Saturn V had the 'option' of the Launch Escape Tower [wikipedia.org] which could (in theory) give the crew one last chance of getting clear of the failed vehicle using it's relatively small solid rockets.
I've often imagined what could go wrong with a shuttle launch, there are possibilities such as:
*Catastrophic multiple SME failure just after SRB ignition leading to an over-rotation heads-down
*A Mis-light of an SRB on the pad (prior to launch) - Apparently NASA takes huge precautions with their SRBs due to volatility of the solid fuel.
*A Mis-light of an SRB on launch causing over-rotation of the vehicle away from the lit SRB(NASA *says* this is of infinitely small chance tho)
*Failure of the SRB release system on the pad (the tie-downs which hold the vehicle in place prior to launch)
*A simple bird-strike causing damage to the orbiter's pressure hull.
And of course, there is the failure of components leading to rapid combustion of the LOX/Hydrogen fuels.
Perhaps none of the above could realistically happen, perhaps some could. (I'm no expert, just a fan of manned spaceflight).
What I do know is that I'll be happier about people sitting on top of massive potential energies when they give them a Launch Escape System again. It's not a certainty but it's nice to know that the Astronauts get one last chance if the rest of the vehicle falls to bits.
Disclaimer: I am not one of these people who thinks that spaceflight is, should be, or can be as safe as say civillian aviation.
Re:The Launch Escape System. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
some of the SRB/SME issues are now fixed (Score:4, Informative)
Since Challenger, the struts were strengthened, so they can now survive even a three-out situation. A two-out failure can now be dealt with without loss of life throughout the launch (although it would require a ditch and loss of the vehicle through some portions). A three-out failure is still problematic, but should be survivable for the crew after 90 seconds, and might be survivable just after launch.
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forgot one important point (Score:3, Interesting)
It bears repeating. (Score:5, Insightful)
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of--wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew--
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
High Flight
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
June 9, 1922 - December 11, 1941 (age 19)
Re:It bears repeating. But with government addenda (Score:5, Funny)
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth(1),
And danced(2) the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed(3) and joined the tumbling mirth(4)
Of sun-split clouds(5) and done a hundred things(6)
You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung(7)
High in the sunlit silence(8). Hov'ring there(9)
I've chased the shouting wind(10) along and flung(10)
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious(12), burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights(13) with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle(14) flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space(15),
Put out my hand(16), and touched the face of God.
Parent
The Green Hills of Earth (Score:3, Insightful)
entire poem located here [rice.edu]...
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet --
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Feynman (Score:5, Informative)
The Rogers Commission [wikipedia.org] relegated the bulk of his thoughts to an "Appendix" because no one wanted to release a report that was too critical of the space program (even though that's exactly what they were appointed to do). It almost wasn't included at all, but for Feynman's dogged insistence.
He deals with his role in the Rogers commission in No Ordinary Genius [google.com] (that's a link to the beginning of the Chapter from Google Print).
That chapter is filled with funny anecdotes, and enraging stories about the bullheadedness of beaurocracy, told by one of the most charismatic geniuses of our time about one of the most important events from my childhood.
Highly recommended.
"tragedy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"tragedy" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"tragedy" (Score:5, Insightful)
You correctly note that they were aware of the risks, they took the risks, and lost. It's not technically 'tragic' or 'tragedy,' but that doesn't at all dismiss the deeply sad, unfortunate nature of the accident, despite the binary view some are ascribing to your comments.
The accident itself is just one in a larger series of events which might collectively be considered 'tragic." As someone noted in comments, there is usually a tragic flaw--such as hubris--giving rise to the tragic events, collectively known in literature as 'tragedy.' In this case, the tragedy is the larger story of humans defying nature and assuming nature had been conquered. This is hubris, on the part of American administration officials, members of Congress, engineers, management officials, and contractors, etc., across decades, culminating in the Challenger disaster.
The 'Challenger Tragedy' is what you could call the story leading from the end of Apollo to the loss of Challenger, and its immediate aftermath, such as the hearings, etc.
Likewise, the 'Columbia Tragedy' would have a similar narrative background, with its own tragic flaw: management deciding to eschew on-orbit imaging because there was "nothing we can do," if damage was found, anyhow."
Both are sad, dramatic events, but not tragedy. I take a contrary view to what yet another commenter wrote, that it was offensive for you to compare real loss of life to fictional loss of life. To be more accurate, people calling the loss of either shuttle a tragedy are themselves using literary terminology to oversimplify a complex series of decisions and actions into a cable news soundbite, and this oversimplification ("The astronauts' deaths were tragic") cheapens, in my view, the loss of seven Americans engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge and understanding.
And with that, I shall adorn myself with aerogel pants and await the flaming...
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Re:"tragedy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you accept risk doesn't mean you waive all rights to sympathy, especially in light of more "noble" causes.
Parent
Am I callous? (Score:5, Interesting)
But when I think of the disaster now, I have the somewhat odd reaction that I don't really feel that the real tragedy was the loss of Challenger and its crew.
When I think about the 20th anniversiary of Challenger, the tragedy I feel is that it seems like NASA has done almost nothing of note since then.
It seems like somewhere around the Challenger disaster, the pioneering attitude of NASA that had been its hallmark up until then took something of a backseat. Somewhere around 20 years ago, probably not at Challenger or because of it but certainly sometime around then, NASA changed from being a truly important thing of importance to the public to just being something the government does. 20 years later, the manned space program has not progressed one single step beyond where it was when Challenger blew up; we're still stuck using the exact same shuttle fleet, and the manned program has been entirely preoccupied with the maintenence of a couple of space stations that aren't really that far beyond SkyLab and whose crews are preoccupied just keeping the things in the sky. NASA has had a small handful of true triumphs with its unmanned probes since that time, but the successes have been far between and have tended to receive only a fraction of the attention given in the public eye to NASA's failures.
And when I think about this, and realize that it represents, essentially, the loss of the nation's manned space program sometime about 20 years ago, it tends to overshadow entirely in my mind the tragedy of the loss of Challenger's intrepid crew sometime about 20 years ago.
Is this a callous response, or a reasonable one?
What a bunch of.... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The booster engineers felt helpless
The reason I'm so harsh about this is that it could've been any one of us that call ourselves "engineers." We should NEVER forget the lesson from this. Someone went against his training AND his instincts and, as a result, PEOPLE DIED.
no one stepped forward (Score:4, Insightful)
And if anyone had, we would have never known about it, and they probably would have been fired.
Boy, the timing is perfect for me (Score:5, Interesting)
It seemed that, almost as soon as the camera crew realized what had happened, they zeroed in on McCauliff's family. It took a while for the cameraman to get his payoff though, she didn't really react for quite some time. No doubt not fully able to comprehend what just happened.
When I got to my class that morning (psychology), I found the professor had also just seen the footage, he cancelled the class. None of us were really into it at that point.
The local news was all over the propulsion professor asking him for theories/insight. At that point though, nobody really knew what had happened and speculation is foolish.
By the end of that day, I was hearing "Need Another Seven Astronauts". In contrast, I've yet to hear any such wise-assed remarks about the Columbia reentry disaster.
===
It's easy to second guess NASA's decision making but, when you are in that moment, it's a hard trigger to pull. I've no doubt that engineers were concerned about the integrity of the O-ring seal. However, when they launched, they were within published spec. Sadly, the spec was wrong. In that situation, it becomes your (expert) opinion vs. established data. You might be right, but it's hard to push through.
I say all of this because I'm right in the middle of something similar. I see a situation that management characterizes as "agressive" and I would call "reckless" - but it's just my opinion. I can't go to the appropriate regulating agencies with anything that would stick. All I can really do is what I've done, I resigned. On paper, I said the recent benefits change was not meeting my needs. Behind close doors, however, I went into very frank detail about how I felt their current philosophies could put people at risk, and how I could no longer represent them in good faith.
I looked for a way to compel the needed changes from my position, but was unsuccessful. I was well respected there, perhaps by resigning and making sure they understood why, they will be motivated to re-evalute. I don't really know.
Re:Boy, the timing is perfect for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
What about the other one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Disaster played over and over (Score:4, Insightful)
The same thing happened on 9/11 with jets crashing.
I hope when the next thing happens I'll have enough self control to shut the damn tv off. I sure didn't those 2 times.
OK, one correction is needed here... (Score:5, Insightful)
A tsunami that kills 125000 people and makes millions homeless is a disaster. A hurricane and weak levees that kill hundreds, combined with a helpless Department of Homeland Security that unhomes 1.3 million, that's a disaster.
An earthquakeor volcanic explosion that kills hundreds or thousands and destroys entire towns, that's a disaster.
A vehicle accident that kills 7 people is not a disaster, no matter how expensive the vehicle is or how famous the people are.
It is the "Challenger Accident", not the "Challenger Disaster".
Keep some perspective.
Dictionary: (Score:4, Informative)
From: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=disaster [reference.com]
disaster n.
1. An occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe.
Challenger accident was not a disaster. To say that money makes the difference between a tragic accident and a disaster is to devalue the real disasters - such as tsunamis.
I was working in the astronaut training facility in 1986 when Challenger blew up. Like many others that day, I didn't see it live, but I did see it on the first replay. My desk didn't have a line-of-site to the office TV and I was plinking away at some code on a 8088 PC.
The sound of a dozen coworkers watching friends die got me up and to the TV.
To those of us at NASA who worked with the crew, it is and will always be an accident.
Because accidents can be prevented, but disasters can't.
Parent
A small Tragedy (Score:4, Insightful)
A Dead Palestinian Child ( Killed by an American funded missile - what went wrong to cause this death, why was this death wrong)
A Dead Iraqi Child ( Killed by an American funded missile - what went wrong to cause this death, why was this death wrong)
etc etc
Coming soon the never written article about dead Iranian Children.
So we navel gaze about this death or that death and was it preventable. If we perhaps demanded from our media to delve with such detail and emotion into the thousands and thousands of deaths that we either cause directly or indirectly every day by our misadventurous policies around the globe.
Every page we write and view about past events ( well past and well covered by now ) is one page less for the voice of those innocent dead that have no voice.
In the end with people resorting to "terrorist" violence as a reaction to attacks or injustice on them and their children, our lack of attention the root causes of these LARGE tradegies has and will continue to come back and bite us.
Sadly the Challenger explosion attracks the lazy voyeur in us all, easy to see and watch, compelling.......but in the overal scheme of things essentially meaningless except as a symbol of corporate greed and cost cutting which leads to short cuts. But we all know this and still do nothing.
So perhaps in the end, even if the American people were subjected to detailed heart wrenching stories of dead foreign babies, they would just yawn and turn the channel.
But who knows?
we do know that when there is a disease, failure to treat the root causes often leads to deaths. In simple terms we kill them they kill us and the cycle of ignorance revolves round and round.
Meanwhile, apologies for spoiling the feel good sadness over 7 deaths.......7 deaths that have had enough column inches by now.
Space: the forgotten frontier (Score:4, Insightful)
I was tired. It was magnificent.
I had probably seen a rocket launch before, and I'm sure its raw power impressed me. But I think what drew me to the shuttle was its streamlined, white grace.
STS-1 was the first full launch and mission of a space shuttle, and it is one my first memories.
I have another space shuttle memory just as vivid. I am at the part of my daily journey from school to home where the park's sidewalk meets the street's. I am staring up, wondering if I can see the white "horns" of the Challenger explosion from the blue of the sky.
I am afraid that a piece of debris will land on me.
My childhood is filled with references to space. I devoured space books. I vastly preferred space Lego to the plain city bricks. When my friends and I played, we imagined we were in space more often than not. My parents raised me on a steady diet of television and film science fiction, not the least of which were Star Trek and Star Wars.
I'm not the only to have a space-filled childhood. Look no further than the 1986 film Space Camp. The movie is really just a series of plot devices so as to create a childly plausible situation in which a few kids get to pilot a space shuttle. In the end, the boys get the space shuttle, the girl, and the robot. You can't argue with that. It's a horrible movie actually, but I remember my friends and I seeing it several times, and re-enacting its scenes. It was cool.
My brother believed he would turn his room into a spaceship. Even though I frequently teased him about it, I secretly admired his tenacity. He studied schematics of spacecraft, starcharts, and physics. He's still working on it.
This month's Wired features an amateur spy satellite tracker named Ted Molczan. He is older than I am, but his childhood sounds similar, only with Apollos instead of Columbias and Challengers.
There are many of us, to us space meant more than emptiness. It was an ideal. Space represented progress, hope, and nobility. To think about space was to wonder. Culture reinforced this. Star Trek was perhaps the best example, with its frontiered hyperbolic optimism. But even the fairly vapid Star Wars infused space with adventure and excitement. Planetside was filled with moisture vaporators and blandly colored sandstorms. Space was permeated with color and sound, excitement and destiny.
Last night I had another visceral memory. When I threw the newly-purchased baby clothes into the washer, time stopped. The collective white of onesies and soft blankets froze in mid-air and I realized that I was washing a child's clothes - my child's clothes - for the first time.
Having recently read the Wired article, my immediate second thought was that my son or daughter would never know the wonder of space like I did, like we did.
I was sad.
This is how it is: space is now empty, dirty, and dark. The space shuttle is an antique. The laptop that I write this blog post on is incredibly more powerful than the ones that control the space shuttle. NASA is a joke. Americans see space more as a source of tourist dollars than a place to find ourselves. Bush's announcement of a moonbase and a trip to Mars was more political foliage than inspirational provocation. Culture is either ignorant or apathetic of space. It is merely a place where things happen, a set, and little more. And, of course, we have no room for something as ridiculously triumphant as Star Trek. Fifty years of unrequited romance has fundamentally changed our perception of the big black.
What kid wants to be an astronaut anymore?
I'd like to say mine, but I've changed too.
Re:NASA... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Motivation (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Motivation (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Motivation (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, you mean like notifying the NASA officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center who were higher in the chain of command than the engineers' direct managers? Furthermore, there was no way for the engineers to know that "more senior NASA managers responsible for the launch commit decision" weren't told of their objections to the launch after the objections had been raised with th
Ever read any user's manual? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they will. Any product will have intrinsic linmitations. Every user's manual has a list of limitations on that product, telling you which ways you shouldn't use it. Of course, the stupidity of user's sometimes exceeds the foresight of documentation writers, and someone misuses a product in a way no one had foreseen. In the shuttle's case it was a record low temperature.
Edward Tufte, in his book "Visual Explanations" has a chapter dedicated to the Challenger disaster. There he shows how the report presented by the engineers the day before the launch was insufficient to convince the managers, because it didn't display properly the correlation between low temperatures and O-ring failures.
There was too much extraneous information on that report. For instance, there were diagrams showing the position of each failure in each flight. That was totally unnecessary to show the correlation. Tufte, in his book, presents an example on which kind of diagram should be in the report. In page 45 there is a diagram showing the temperature on each launch, with the severity of O-ring failures, if any. Below 66 degrees Fahrenheit, every launch had had O-ring problems. The predicted temperature the day before the Challenger disaster was in the 26 6o 29 degrees range.
However, despite what Tufte says, engineers are neither salespeople nor diplomats, it's not their duty to convince anyone. They should just present the facts. It's the managers' job to be able to understand what the team they lead are trying to say. And I wouldn't blame managers either. They have so many factors to ponder that, if they stop the launch on any possibility of failure, no one would have ever flown an airplane, much less a space ship.
I believe the real culprits in the Challenger disaster are all the people who say "Oh, why explore space? Think of the children! We should never go to space while there are hungry children on Earth!", and so on, ad nauseam. To counteract that kind of corny non-argument the politicians invented such stunts as sending teachers to space, stunts that make it very difficult to cancel a launch that has political implications, even if the circumstances all point to the dangers in launching at that exact moment.
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Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did it explode or didn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
There is sufficent evidence that the bodies of the astronauts were put in barrels on the back of a flatbed when brought ashore as to not raise any suspicion
Pieces of Challenger still occasionally wash up on the beach, with a large wing portion showing up on the beach in the late nineties. Pieces of the wreckage of the shuttle are "entombed" in a missile silo on Cape Canaveral.
There is this very prescient article [washingtonmonthly.com] written while the shuttles were being built. He also wrote an excellent followup [earthisland.org] after Columbia. Personally, I thought Challenger was a "one-off" and that things had been fixed, but I lost all faith in the space agency (and its subsequent funding for the expensive shuttles).
There never been an exact cost released by NASA for what it takes to launch a shuttle, but I'm quite sure that it is very much more than the 500 million they said before the Columbia disaster. Some say more than a billion dollars.
Which I believe would be the cost to build a decent Hubble replacement and launch on an unmanned rocket. Food for thought.
Parent
Re:Did it explode or didn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
The Shuttle is expensive to launch. When we lost the Titan IV in 1998, the rocket itself was valued at 400 million (by far the most expensive expendable rocket) and the satellite was estimated at around 800 million. Shuttle costs probably would exceed 1 billion per ignoring all the return to flight issues.
This is why whenever I hear space advocates and astronomers whining about trying to get the Hubble fixed using the shuttle, I want to grab them by the throat and throttle them. It would be much cheaper and would stop diverting valuable resources to focus their energies on getting the next generation Hubble replacement into space on an expendable rocket. With the savings they could get ITS replacement into space. An expendable launch on an Atlas V or Delta IV would run less than 200 million, possibly less than 100. Plus, now they would have a presumably better satellite in space. Also, the satellite would not have to be designed so that an astronaut could fix it.
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Re:Did it explode or didn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
It was not an explosion in the literal sense of the word...it would have been merciful for the crew if it were.
rj
Parent
Re:Someone did step forward (Score:4, Informative)
I checked my Challenger file; the spelling is Boisjoly. Unfortunately I don't have a citation written on my photocopy of the interview with him: "Some of the things NASA booster manager Larry Mulloy said ... went beyond probing; it was the start of intimidation. But even with that, our chief engineer said he would not recommend launching."
I was just flipping through a 1990 Miami Herald article on Bill McInnis, who made repeated claims of a hydrogen fuel line leak with the shuttle (visible, he said, with Challenger). NASA grounded the fleet for a fuel line leak about two weeks after he committed suicide. The chilling part of this article: "He talked, too, of failures in the thermal protection tiles that keep the shuttle from burning up on re-entry, and of what he believed to have been a lack of proper testing..." The reason I was flipping through the article was to get Mike Clemens' name right. He was a Cape engineer who warned his boss about the O-rings; his boss didn't pass it up. Mike committed suicide after Challenger, feeling responsible for not successfully persuading his boss. I had a list somewhere--I think it had three names on it--of people who warned about the O-rings and killed themselves out of a feeling of responsibility later.
To claim "They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward" is inaccurate, irresponsible, and horribly unfair to people who lost their jobs over this. Furthermore, it continues to obscure the root cause of the accident. Of course, MSNBC doesn't have a link for feedback about the article.
Parent