The Challenger
It is the 25th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger catastrophe. I heard about it on the radio when it happened, and went home and watched it on television. It was not just an accident. Space travel is inherently dangerous. What might be a problem or just an inconvenience in another arena can result in catastrophic failure in a spacecraft. But in this case, the engineers told management it was too cold to launch and it should be postponed. Management decided to launch, anyway, for reasons they never explained. There have been rumors of pressure from the white House. Reagan was due to deliver his State of the Union address that evening and the successful launch of the space shuttle was an integral part of the speech. NASA denied there was any pressure and the administration said they had not pushed for the launch. We will never know for sure, but there probably was a phone call from the white House, asking if they were going to go ahead with the launch.
A phone call from the white House is in itself pretty powerful pressure to do whatever it is they want you to do. If that call was not just an inquiry but a direct push to go ahead, that makes it even tougher to ignore. Still, NASA management should not override their engineers where safety is concerned. If the engineers say there is a significant chance of a catastrophic failure, and that is exactly what they said, the launch must be postponed, no matter who wants it to proceed.
What happened was an O-ring, which is a kind of seal, failed. This was in the right solid rocket booster. This caused a breach in the joint it sealed, allowing pressurized hot gas from within the motor to impinge on the attachment hardware and the external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the hardware and the structural failure of the fuel tank. Even though the shuttle appears to explode on the video, that is not actually how it happened. What you see in the photos is what happened after the shuttle fell apart. It is what NASA called “localized combustion”. Had the liquid hydrogen actually exploded, the entire craft would have been destroyed in a massive fireball. It appears from NASA statements that at least one of the crew members was still alive when the capsule hit the water. Any that were alive at that point were killed instantly on impact.
NASA managers had known there was a problem with the O-rings since 1977, but they did not understand the nature of the danger and they did not listen to what their engineers told them. After the disaster, there was a commission to investigate what happened. The majority report tried to play down the disaster as just an accident and avoid laying blame directly on NASA management.
However, one member of the commission was Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics. He issued a minority report that explained clearly what had happened and why. At a public hearing conducted by the commission, he placed a couple of rubber rings, similar to the O-rings in the challenger, in an ice and water bath. Later he removed them and broke them, showing that when they are very cold they become brittle and no longer act as a seal.
It was not an accident or an act of nature. It was a direct result of a grievous failure by NASA management.
