Front row, left to right: Michael J. Smith (pilot), Francis "Dick" Scobee (commander), Ronald McNair.
Back row, left to right: Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik.
The segment seals on one of the solid rocket boosters began leaking by almost as soon as the boosters were ignited. Of course, it wasn't as simple as all that, but still, 73 seconds after launch, the launch vehicle broke apart, which tore apart the spacecraft.
The Challenger disaster tore up part of NASA, which got crucified for laxity. It was pretty well established in the post-flight investigation that the engineers for both NASA and Morton-Thiokol, (the manufacturer of the SRBs) knew that the seals on the SRBs were a problem and rather than address the problem, the managers re-wrote the safety considerations so that the problem would go away.
On paper, that is. As Richard Feynman pointed out in his section of the report, nature cannot be fooled.
I recall that day pretty clearly. I had stopped out of college for a semester and was working in Lockheed's Palo Alto Research Laboratory as a programmer in their space sciences division. Dr Loren Acton, a solar physicist, worked there as well and had been an astronaut on an earlier Challenger mission. Many of the scientists in the facility were working on instruments designed to be flown on the space shuttle. When the shuttle was grounded, the instruments were put in a clean room and the scientists and engineers had to scramble to get new grants & instruments to work on.
ReplyDeleteWhat a terrible tragedy it was for those whose lives were lost, especially considering how avoidable it was.
Rank and file Morton Thiokol engineers opposed the launch, but the Morton brass succumbed to pressure from NASA, which was anxious to have the launch in time for the State of the Union Address.
ReplyDeleteThe Morton engineer who finally signed off on the launch was told by his boss to "take of your engineering hat and put on our manager hat".
This is still used as a case study in engineering ethics courses.