Business as Usual
The morning of January 28, 1986, was unseasonably cold for Brevard County, on the Atlantic Coast of Florida. Overnight temperatures at Cape Canaveral had been well below freezing, and as day broke serrations of icicles hung from the launch tower supporting Space Shuttle Challenger.
Engineers employed by the company that manufactured the shuttle’s booster engines strongly urged delaying the launch until Canaveral’s air temperature was at least 53°F, where their data told them that the enormous o-rings installed between booster sections would retain enough resilience to provide a reliable seal against escaping superhot combustion gases. In fact, they refused to sign off on the launch. Under pressure to deliver a flight before President Reagan’s State of the Union Address, NASA managers in turn pressured the manufacturer’s executives, who within hours overrode their engineers.
At 11:39 AM local time, the engines were ignited. A little over a minute later, around 14,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, Challenger broke up amid the fury of millions of pounds of raging rocket fuel, leaving billowing trails of smoke that arced and hung above the ocean for many long, brooding minutes – an image televised to millions of people live, as it happened.
No one survived.
I have a very clear memory of that day, and what I remember is the numbing shock. The entire country was stunned. No one had believed that anything could go so wrong.
In the weeks that followed the “accident”, as the press referred to it, the late crew were mourned as heroes who gave their lives conquering the unknown. Astronauts had been public figures ever since those heady days when they had first set out atop their pillars of fire and romped across the surface of the Moon. The President, a man of warm and simple ideas, likened the crew to the pioneers who had settled the nation’s frontiers, and the comparison struck a chord with the American people, who responded with renewed support for their leader.
But the President was wrong, and the people misled. Space exploration is not like plowing forty acres or setting fence posts on a homestead. As any modern enterprise, space is the business of organizations, in this case employing thousands of highly trained people, and the success of the enterprise depends, not on individual heroism, but on how the organization is run.
Top management at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been sufficiently confident in the safety and reliability of the shuttle to invite a schoolteacher to join the Challenger crew – and widely publicize her – as they had previously invited a U. S. Senator, which is why millions of schoolchildren experienced the trauma of watching the death of Christa McAuliffe on live television. Given the dimensions of the tragedy, as well as persistent rumors that NASA administrators had received repeated warnings previously, it was natural for the nation to inquire just how this particular organization was being run. Naturally, a commission was organized to investigate, and, naturally, the investigation consisted mainly in wading through official NASA reports and following NASA guided tours, and for a time it seemed as though the Commission would not reach any more specific conclusion than President Reagan already had, that accidents are bound to happen.
But one member of the Commission was a certain Dr. Richard P. Feynmann, who had a well-deserved reputation for intellectual independence. Feynmann asked his own questions of engineers and technicians. He learned of compromised procedures and well-known weaknesses in the shuttle boosters. He learned of memoranda circulated by NASA engineers that assessed the shuttle’s safety risks to be orders of magnitude greater than NASA’s official claims.
Finally, during a hearing in which the Commission was questioning a witness about the now infamous o-rings, Feynmann produced a sample of o-ring material from his pocket, demonstrated its resilience, and dropped it in a glass of iced water. He then pulled it out and showed the room that it would no longer spring back to shape, putting to rest in a moment the question that had been debated ad nauseum: Had the o-rings lost critical resilience in the freezing temperatures? A roomful of television cameras and equivocating officials gaped at Dr. Feynmann and his rigid rubber, dumbfounded, and possibly a little frightened, that the truth could be this simple.
Disaster often separates myth from reality. The myth that, since they sat in a cockpit, the astronauts were personally blazing trails into space collided with the reality that they were basically passengers and employees, their success and safety in the hands of many other people. The myth that, since NASA employed thousands of highly trained people, it was therefore competently run, collided with the reality that the efforts of all those capable people had in many ways been thwarted and undermined.
The public much prefers the myth, and its illusions were probably never in any serious jeopardy, certainly not from politicians and managers anxious to get back to business as usual.
Four more years of business as usual went by, and the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. Within hours, scientists were horrified to find that the optical system was crippled, to the point of being almost useless. It was eventually determined that the primary mirror, an eight-foot precision glass disk, had been incorrectly ‘figured’, and would not focus as designed. How could this happen? The responsible contractor had ignored conflicting test results and warnings from its own experts, citing the letter of its contract, and delivered a defective mirror – which no one else checked until the telescope was in orbit.
To the great surprise of many, and even greater relief, Hubble was eventually fixed, by another shuttle mission to install a specially-constructed corrective lens – an admirable achievement in orbit, but also a billion dollar band-aid.
Business as usual continues. With meddling from a Congress intent on protecting incumbent jobs and listening to donors, NASA’s Artemis program to return to the Moon is five years late on a ten-year schedule, has burned through over twice its original budget, and will soon launch four astronauts in a capsule that has yet to execute a successful uncrewed test flight. This is strikingly reminiscent of the Boeing Starliner fiasco, another much-delayed space capsule that was prematurely launched with a human crew without first completing a successful test flight, and which then marooned that crew on the International Space Station for nine months, while NASA stumbled around looking for a way to bring them home.
This is not to point fingers at just one organization, NASA or Congress. But these are a few more graphic illustrations of a decade-by-decade decline in the mighty American State – that organization so crucial to the success and welfare of America as a nation – from those heady days when astronauts first set out atop their pillars of fire, sixty-odd years ago.
Today, NASA is again under pressure to deliver a flight sooner rather than later, in a troubled program, and again for venal political reasons. We should wish the Artemis crew the very best of luck. They may need it.
Personally, I wish luck would not have so much to do with it.
About The Author
