The Space Shuttle: 8. A major malfunction

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This episode contains scenes some listeners might find upsetting.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

Challenger, go at throttle-up.

Today, go at throttle-up.

I hear some crackle, and I notice that the data, but that's not unusual, data dropout, you know, or something.

But Fred kind of hits me and says, look.

And

I looked at that monitor over there and I did not know what I was looking at because by then it was just this

fireball.

Where, just moments ago, there was Space Shuttle Challenger ascending into orbit.

Now, all Capcom Dick Covey can see is a cloud of fire and vapor.

The two solid rocket motors emerge from the cloud and arc upwards, leaving long trails of smoke behind them.

They're out of control, no longer attached to the rest of the shuttle.

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.

Obviously a major malfunction.

I'm still processing a lot of some visual information, but I'm looking and I still have no data.

You know, I'm in full operational mode, which is: all right,

what do we know?

Is there anything I can tell the crew?

Is there anything I should say?

My primary thing is a Capcom: I'm not going to say something to the crew unless I can help them.

So I never made another transmission to the Challenger.

That was it.

The launch just didn't look right.

I know I was in shock and disbelief, and

probably not understanding everything

right away, but looking and thinking, you know, something this just doesn't look right as, you know, basically pieces are falling.

Barbara Morgan, the backup to Krista McAuliffe as teacher in space, has been watching the launch with the families of the crew members.

You know, I,

yes, there's hope, but

I don't think any of us really believe that there could be any hope of survival of something like that.

Flight Frido.

Go ahead.

RSR reports vehicle exploded.

We,

as quick as we could, got together the people in the area that needed to get to the crew quarters and get the families there.

You know, we had work to do.

We had families in a terrible situation.

We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.

Flight director confirms that.

We are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point.

I was just looking at the TV.

The little TV was all I could see.

I was too far back to see.

through the windows at the front of the firing room.

Shuttle processing engineer John Tribe is standing in launch control in Florida.

Instantly it was a, oh my god, you know it wasn't a like, wonder what that is.

You know it was a, oh I don't know what it is but it's this is a disaster.

Contingency procedures are in effect.

We will report more as we have information available.

The one image I have that just stays with me is the wing coming down, floating down like a leaf.

It looked like it was just

wasn't a big hunk of hardware crashing down out of the sky it was just like it was floating down and you know it was so hard to believe

here i am working on a launch pad for the first flight there's never been a launch off of this pad this vehicle's just been destroyed also in the room at launch control is pad leader Bill Carr.

And I couldn't in my mind clarify that we hadn't done something wrong.

Did we miss something?

Nobody knew what happened.

We were at a loss.

Booster slide.

Slipers, did you see anything?

Nothing.

So I looked at all the tournament camps.

It's perfect right on the prediction.

All the red lines are in diction.

Admission control in Houston.

Flight director Jay Green doesn't understand what went wrong.

Army.

We look this fine.

He goes around the room.

Here Econ.

Econom, Flight.

Flight cam, we look normal.

Checking in with each of the flight controllers.

DPS, all data's normal.

One by one.

Rob, everything looked good for us.

GMC.

Flight, uh, the roll maneuver looked fine, but we saw that we were on our way decreasing rail rate as we lost data.

Dubby.

All of the data looked normal.

Right up to the the moment Challenger broke up.

Not a single person in mission control has any idea what has happened.

But there is one place where people know exactly what's happened.

In a conference room on the other side of the country where they're watching the launch on TV.

And

it was so quiet in there, as if

I think everyone was kind of dumbfounded.

At NASA contractor Morton Firecole in Utah, a group of engineers understand

almost immediately.

And of course, they showed it again, and then I realized, oh my gosh.

And

I just knew that

I just knew it was our problem.

From the BBC World Service, Thirty Minutes presents the Space Shuttle.

I'm space scientist Maggie Adarin Pocock.

Episode 8 of 10.

A major malfunction.

Let me take you back to the morning of Monday the 28th of January 1986,

24 hours before launch.

The point of time that that

set of events started cascading was about my lunchtime.

Brian Russell is a junior engineer with NASA contractor Morton Firecoll in Brigham City, Utah.

He's the youngest in his team, bright and eager to learn.

He works under long-term Firecoll engineer Bob Ebling.

And just as Russell is sitting down to lunch, Ebling receives a call.

It was from a NASA person who said the temperatures are going to be as low as 27 or 29 degrees, whatever it was, overnight down at

Cape Kennedy.

That's below zero degrees Celsius.

Ahead of the launch, the overnight temperatures are going to be freezing.

And is there anything that would cause you concern?

And Bob came out of his office and mentioned that to me, and both he and I, the O-rings.

He was

brutally honest, but

you couldn't ask for a nicer guy.

Very, very brilliant.

Bob Eberling's daughter, Leslie Eberling-Cerner, also works for Thiacol.

She's with the publications department.

And shortly after the call, she stops by her dad's office.

Asked him how he was doing, how's his day?

He said, we've got to stop this launch.

This launch cannot proceed because the weather is too bad.

He said it's never going to work.

We're going to have a catastrophic disaster.

To understand Bob Ebling's concerns, let me tell you about Morton Firecall's role in the shuttle program.

The company is responsible for making the solid rocket boosters.

Those are the two huge pencil-shaped rockets on either side of the shuttle stack.

They supply most of the thrust needed to lift the shuttle off the launch pad and push it into Earth's upper atmosphere in the first few minutes of the mission.

But they aren't made of a single piece.

Instead, Each rocket consists of four massive cylindrical segments which are stacked on top of each other.

And between each each cylinder there's a joint that keeps the pieces together.

So when the boosters ignite at launch, unleashing forces of almost 7 million pounds of thrust and temperatures hot enough to melt steel, the joints have to prevent any of the burning gases escaping.

If the flames did escape, they could blow the booster wide open.

So to ensure this doesn't happen, each joint has a seal, a massive circular piece of rubber.

It's called an O-ring.

Well, it's like a washer, a big rubber washer that's put in these segments that creates suction pressure so that nothing blows by it because it's like a bomb.

You know, any kind of gas, once there's an ignition, it is going to find some place to go.

The giant washer description of the O-ring is a good way to describe it.

And now with the diameter of 12 feet, the O-ring is 40 feet long.

And to make it safer, there are not one, but two O-rings in each joint.

A primary and a secondary.

But this isn't the first time that there's been concern about them.

On several occasions, the O-rings have come back charred and damaged after launch.

And the first time this happened was only the second flight of the shuttle, STS-2, in November 1981, over four years ago.

Since then, there have been multiple calls for help.

After another incident in early 1985, FireCoal engineer Roger Beaujolais wrote a memo to management expressing his concern.

This is him speaking to Dr.

Mark Mayer, an academic who has studied what happened.

And I ended it by saying it is my honest and very real fear that if we do not take immediate action to dedicate a team to solve the problem with the field joints having the number one priority, then we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launch pad facilities.

In other words, the space shuttle could blow up on the launch pad.

So in the summer of 1985, FireGirl creates an official O-ring task force, a specialist team that includes Roger Beaujolais, Bob Ebling and Brian Russell.

Their job is to fix any O-ring issues from earlier missions.

But none of those earlier missions have ever seen the kinds of freezing temperatures expected the morning of the 28th of January, 1986.

You know, you look at your household experience with rubber, you put it outside in the freezing cold, it's going to become very hard.

And as it warms up, it becomes softer.

And that's exactly what the O-rings did.

And we knew it.

And so that became a real point of concern.

Enough of a concern that after speaking to Bob Ebling, Brian Russell gets hold of the rest of the O-ring task force.

It's now early afternoon, the day before launch.

We gathered ourselves together and we met in Bob's office and started talking things over.

And all of us came to the conclusion that we ought to recommend to wait and not launch at those temperatures.

Now, the fact that we would come up and recommend not to launch at the time appointed was a big deal and we knew it.

So we realized, well, we're going to need to pull together a justification for this.

And so we all went our different ways in pulling together the data.

Russell and his colleagues set to work.

They frantically collect numbers, charts, temperature tests, any information they can find.

Their first call with NASA happens late that afternoon.

And we just kind of brought together a bunch of papers and were showing them and they told us rightly so, go organize this and

come up with a presentation that's logical and makes some sense.

The team gets back to work.

We were rushing about in real time trying to make sure that we had all of our data correct and that we had it represented in a way that was proper.

I thought it was quite an effort to pull it together.

And so that's what we got ready for the telecon that night, where we had everyone together.

The teleconference is scheduled to start at 6:15 p.m.

Utah time.

It's a three-way phone call between engineers at FireCoal and NASA groups at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

At FireColl, it's held in a large conference room.

The managers and vice presidents sit at a long table in the middle.

The rest of the team sit either at the table or on chairs around the edge of the room.

Bob Eberling is there, and so is Brian Russell.

I felt nervousness in that we had never recommended to delay a launch.

But I knew that we were taking on a large degree of risk, and

I felt it was unnecessary risk.

And the thought in the back of my mind was:

wait another two days.

Florida never stays cold for a very long time and if we launched instead of on Tuesday on Thursday, what's the big deal with that?

And that's really how I thought.

The engineers are here to persuade NASA that the risk is too great to launch.

The presentation consists of about a dozen pages, mostly handwritten.

There wasn't any time to get them typed.

We started off introducing the subject, that it's the joints and the o-rings, and then we dug into the charts in the presentation.

There's a history of all the flights with joint issues, temperature tests of O-rings, and more.

One particular chart shows data for two flights, the two worst cases they've had so far.

On both, they've had hot gases flow past the primary O-ring.

This is called blow-by.

Roger Beaujolais, the engineer who wrote the memo saying the shuttle could blow up, is presenting this chart.

In January 1985 I was sent down to the Cape and while I was there I was tasked to inspect the hardware as it was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, as I had done in the past.

The launch of STS-51C a year earlier has been the coldest launch so far at 53 degrees Fahrenheit or 11.5 degrees Celsius.

And when Beaujolais examined the O-rings in the joints of the solid rocket boosters, he almost couldn't believe what he saw.

I discovered that the two joints in that vehicle contained massive hot gas blow-by.

If you put it in layman's terms, you couldn't encompass the amount of damage by spreading your arms.

It was much, much more than we had ever seen before.

Absolute amazement that we had not had a disaster at that point in time.

The blow-by on this flight had even reached the secondary O-ring.

The other flight on Beaujolais chart is the mission with the second worst blowby.

Now this mission launched when the temperature was much warmer, 75 degrees Fahrenheit or 24 degrees Celsius.

Someone on the net commented that we had soot blowby at 75 degrees.

This recording is of Roger Beaujolais speaking to the Presidential Commission tasked with finding the cause of the Challenger tragedy.

The Rogers Commission.

That's where the first comment came in about the disparity between my conclusion and the observed data because SRM-22 had blow-by at essentially a room temperature launch.

The NASA teams at Marshall and Kennedy are confused.

The two worst cases of O-ring damage happened at vastly different temperatures.

So why would cold be a problem?

I was asked for data to support my claim and I said I have none other than what is being presented.

Others in the room presented their charts.

The conclusions were that we should not fly outside of our database, which was 53 degrees.

So the o-mine temperature at launch should be at least as warm as when they experienced their worst blow-by, 53 degrees Fahrenheit or 11.5 degrees Celsius.

The following morning would be much much colder.

Those were the conclusions.

And we were quite pleased because we knew in advance, having participated in their preparation, what the conclusions were and we felt very comfortable with that.

The presentation ends.

A voice answers on the conference call line.

It's Marshall Space Flight Center's Larry Molloy, who's speaking from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

He's in charge of everything to do with the solid rocket boosters.

Here's Molloy speaking to the Rogers Commission.

I asked Mr.

Kilmister then, who is the vice president of Space Booster Projects, for his recommendation for 51L.

He stated that based on the engineering recommendation, he cannot recommend launch.

For the first time in the whole space shuttle program, a contractor objects to a launch.

But Larry Malloy thinks they came to the wrong conclusion.

And the logic for his recommendation, which did not specifically address don't launch 51L, what it said was that within our experience base, we should not operate any solid rocket motor at any temperature colder than we have previously operated one, which was 51C.

Didn't you take that to be a negative?

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

That was an engineering conclusion, which I found this conclusion without basis, and I challenged this logic.

Brian Mussell remembers this moment very well.

Larry Malloy went on and made a pretty convincing case of why temperature was independent of all that was going on with O-ring blow-by and erosion.

And actually his case had a lot of logic to it.

And that took about five minutes to explain his logic, why he felt that we didn't need that kind of a lower limit on temperature.

Larry Malloy ends his argument by saying, my God, Firecoal, when do you want me to launch?

Next April?

And I thought that comment was,

that's the one that really upset me the most because he knew dang well, as I did, that a couple days in Florida, things change change radically.

You're not down there with a northern U.S.

deep freeze.

It's going to last from October until April.

It's a few-day event.

And so

that comment really

made me angry.

Later, during the Rogers Commission hearings, Molloy is asked to comment on his statement.

The total context, I think, in which those words may have been used is there are currently no launch commit criteria for joint temperature.

Launch commit criteria.

These are all the conditions that need to be met to go ahead with the launch.

At this point there are no criteria for the temperature of the booster joints.

What you are proposing to do is to generate a new launch commit criteria on the eve of a launch after we have successfully flown with the existing launch commit criteria 24 previous times.

With this LCC,

i.e., do not launch with a temperature greater than 53 degrees, we may not be able to launch until next April.

We need to consider this carefully before we jump to any such conclusions.

Larry Malloy asks another NASA team member for his opinion.

George Hardy, Associate Director at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

George Hardy was a key member and

he was a very well-respected, and I still respect him, of his capabilities as an engineer.

Hardy says he's appalled at the FireCall recommendation.

Although he adds that he won't launch against the contractor's recommendation.

That just pinned me right to the wall.

I wasn't expecting that.

To say he was appalled meant that to me that, man, you guys came up with a recommendation that makes no sense whatsoever.

And so I feel

the question came: Are you concerned about any part of your rocket motor with the overnight temperatures predicted to be what they were?

And

my thought about at that time, and even since then, is: if you can't stand the answer, don't ask the question.

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The teleconference between engineers at NASA contractor TharCol in Utah and teams for Marshall and Kennedy Space Centers has been going on for over an hour.

TharCol has presented evidence to support their concerns about the space shuttle launching in freezing temperatures which are forecast for tomorrow morning.

But at the end of the presentation, Larry Malloy explains why he disagrees with the FireCoal conclusion, and George Hardy says he's appalled at the recommendation.

Joe Kilminster, one of the vice presidents at Firecoll, calls for a five-minute offline meeting, a caucus.

He mutes their side of the the call to consider the situation with his team.

We discussed what Larry Malloy had said and about his logic and again

reminding

people

that the data were mixed and that temperature was independent of O-ring behavior.

Engineers Arnie Thompson and Roger Beaujolais sense that this is their last chance to convince their managers.

Beaujolais has seen the ovin damage on the coldest flights with his own eyes.

He starts raising his voice and he pounds the table as he speaks.

Look at these photos of what happened last year and how extensive it was and how the soot was jet black.

None of the engineers in the room speak in favour of launch.

But when it comes to Falcon management, Beaujolais and Thompson's arguments seem to fall on deaf ears.

Finally, Jerry Mason, our general manager, got up and said, we've plowed this ground before.

We are just repeating the same things we had said before and maybe trying to do it in a more forceful manner.

General manager Jerry Mason says he wants to take a poll, but he keeps it small.

I think Jerry knew in the room that a lot of people would not be in favor of launching and so he pulled the vice presidents in the room.

Only the four vice presidents will have a say.

So he himself said I think I'm ready to go.

Mason turns to Cal Wiggins, his deputy general manager.

who also gives his okay for launching.

Next is Joe Kilminster.

Having looked at the data again, he says he would be in favor of launching on schedule.

And that essentially put it in Bob Lund's lap because he was the vice president overall of engineering.

Now it's all up to Bob Lund.

And at that point, he was tussling in his mind and really wrestling with the answer that he should give in the face of everything.

And I really felt bad for his position that he was in because

here our single, by far, biggest and most important customer wanted to launch.

Here, his general manager wanted to launch.

And his peer in Joe Kilminster said that he was willing to launch.

And yet, he had his engineering team behind him who had worked all day and used data that we'd had previously saying that we ought to wait.

Jerry Mason senses Lund's hesitation and tells him, it's time to take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.

What did you have in mind when you asked him to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat?

Here he is taking a question during the Rogers Commission hearings.

I had in mind the fact that we

had identified that we could not quantify, we didn't have the data to do that, and therefore it was going to take a judgment rather than a precise engineering calculation in order to conclude what we needed to conclude.

Some people interpreted that to mean

don't worry about what engineering says, just

be a manager and be a team player and submit.

But even at the time, I realized what Jerry was saying.

He was saying, hey, Bob, it is time to make a decision.

Sitting before the Rogers Commission months later, Bob Lund is asked about his decision that day.

He's the chairman, William Rogers.

Well, you must have known your recommendation was very important.

You knew that if you voted against the launch, it would not have been launched, didn't you?

Well, we had voted prior to it and they didn't accept it, so I couldn't forecast what Nash.

No, but you knew that that was the reason they asked you to reconsider.

That's why you went to have the five-minute recess, didn't you?

That's a fair statement, yes.

Finally,

Bob Lund casts his vote.

Bob said that it would probably be okay and that he would agree to launch.

The decision is made.

At this point, the five-minute offline meeting has now gone on for half an hour.

Thiacol unmutes their side of the call.

Joe Kilminster said that we have evaluated the situation again and we support the launch.

I wish, I wish, I wish I'd have said there's a dissenting view here.

Just to let people know that it wasn't unanimous at Thiacol.

Even though the managers, the vice presidents, had voted for it, there was at least one who didn't feel that

we should be taking that risk.

But Brian Russell doesn't speak up.

Nobody does.

Larry Molloy asks to get the recommendation in writing.

Alan MacDonald, a Thiacor manager currently at the Kennedy Space Center, is supposed to sign it, but he refuses.

So Vice President Joe Kilminster does instead.

And Brian Russell uses the fax machine to send the signed copy to Kennedy Space Center.

A few minutes later, Russell and Beaujolais speak to each other in the hallway.

And we were both just worked up and agitated at what all had happened.

And I said, Roger, we were in the exact opposite philosophical position where if you had a problem, you had to show, to prove by data, by testing, by analysis, by whatever means to make a logical argument of why it was okay to fly.

So if it wasn't safe to fly, you didn't fly.

The default position was, don't fly.

unless you can show it's safe.

And I said, we had to prove it was unsafe.

The exact opposite.

And Roger said, it was kind of like the light went on in him and he said, Bry, you're right.

After the call ends, FICOL manager Alan MacDonald tries to convince Larry Malloy to postpone the flight, but to no avail.

Larry Malloy and the other NASA managers at the meeting do not tell their superiors about the teleconference or their O-in concerns.

Molloy later states that he was following protocol, that the issue was resolved at his level and there was no need to pass it on.

The launch is going ahead.

This is Shuttle Launch Control at T-1 hour, 40 minutes, and counting.

The morning of the launch of Challenger, Mission STS-51L.

As she does every day, Leslie Eberling-Cerner carpools out of the firecoal plant with her dad, Bob Ebeling, and his colleagues.

The temperature on board the orbiter, I'm just a little bit above 60 degrees, although the temperature flowing.

So we're driving out there, and of course, we heard all about how they were voted down.

Dad was beating his hand on the dashboard and then on the steering wheel.

And he said, I should have gone home and gotten a gun.

And I could have held them hostage and said, You're not launching.

I will not allow you to launch.

We pulled in, and he said,

This is going to be a horrible way for me to end my career.

My career is over.

I'm like, Dad, no,

it won't be.

It won't be.

It's going to be okay.

And he's like, No, he said, We're going to have a catastrophic event.

He said, I I stake my life on it.

We're expecting clear skies, light winds.

Shortly after, they're all in a conference room, the same one that they used last night, waiting to watch the shuttle launch.

T-minus 45 seconds in counting.

The solid rocket booster flight instrumentation recorders have gone into the record mode.

My dad

was in a chair, and I sat on the floor in front of him.

And Roger Bourgeois

was in front of me.

The SRB hydraulic power units have started.

It was packed.

And I ended up sitting on the floor toward the back near that same table that we had the meeting before.

T minus 15 seconds.

Next to Brian Russell is another manager who has heard what happened during last night's meeting.

And he knew that I had been a part of it.

And sitting next to him, when the vehicle cleared the tower.

And lift off,

lift off of the 25th Space Shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.

He looked over at me and he said, we dodged the bullet.

There was like a sigh of relief

after it went past the tower.

And Dad bends down to me and he says, It's not over yet.

And within seconds, it exploded.

I mean, it was that profound.

When I saw the explosion on the screen,

it was unbelievable to me.

I don't know what I was thinking.

I didn't think it was real, but why wouldn't it be real?

And

honestly, the silence was deafening.

Nobody was saying anything.

And I think my dad put his face in his hands and he started sobbing uncontrollably.

Roger started crying.

I was crying.

And I think just the three of us, we were just kind of like, oh my gosh, this really, this really happened.

And I just knew that

I just knew it was our problem.

I was just stunned.

And I saw Roger, who was near the front of the room, get up and leave through a front side door.

And

he was beside

he was beside himself.

And

I sat there for another minute or so, and then I got up and I went straight down to his office.

And he was crying.

and I was crying

and it's been

almost 40 years

of course time softens things but you never lose it

so why did challenger happen

Over the next weeks it becomes clear exactly what happened on that day.

It starts at the moment of launch, inside one of the solid rocket booster joints.

The fuel inside the right booster ignites.

A powerful jet of flame pushes out through the engine nozzles.

creating the force to lift Challenger off the launch pad.

But at that moment, flames are also making their way through the insulating putty towards the O-rings.

They're like a blowtorch.

The O-rings and the grease begin to burn.

Puffs of smoke escape through the seal and out of the side of the booster.

But then, charred matter from the burned material clogs the gap.

It creates a weak seal.

That's what prevents Challenger from breaking up right there on the launch pad.

But

59 seconds into the ascent, as the shuttle goes through its biggest dynamic pressures, the seal is broken.

A flame emerges from the right side of the booster.

The force of the flame plays directly on a strut holding the booster to the external tank.

As the strut weakens, the right rocket booster breaks free,

smashing into Challenger's wing and then hitting the external tank.

A few seconds later, the flame works its way into the external tank.

73 seconds after launch, Challenger disappears in a ball of flame and vapor.

That's what happened on launch day.

But the question of why Challenger happened isn't just a technical one.

It's a question that many people, astronauts, academics, politicians and ordinary citizens have asked since.

It's been almost a week since our nation and family stood together as we watched Challenger slip beyond our grasp.

After Challenger, President Reagan announced a commission under the chairmanship of former U.S.

Secretary of State William Rogers to address exactly that question.

It's time now to assemble a group of distinguished Americans to take a hard look at the accident, to make a calm and deliberate assessment of the facts and

ways to avoid repetition.

The Rogers Commission was an exceptional group of people, including Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and Sally Ride,

one of the 35 new guys who lost her friends and colleagues in the disaster.

The Commission will review the circumstances surrounding the accident, determine the probable cause or causes, and develop recommendations for corrective action.

And this commission will report back to me within 120 days.

Ultimately, the Rogers Commission concluded that Challenger was, quote, an accident rooted in history.

They criticised NASA's decision-making in communication, its management structure and the schedule pressure.

Its whole organisational culture.

Well,

obviously a bad decision on the part of Marshall

to browbeat Morton Tharkall into accepting the temperature that day when they did not have the data to prove that it was safe to fly.

Shuttle processing engineer John Tribe.

It was that simple.

When O-rings get cold, they don't work.

And at some point, you've got to say, okay, it's too cold, don't use that O-ring in that function.

And

they drove right by that.

And

the fact that decisions were made

but weren't communicated up the chain as to the significance of the decisions that were made.

Astronaut Dick Covey.

That was the main failure.

That was it.

And the culture that allowed that to go that way, the subjugation of a contractor by NASA management was

the most disappointing thing about it.

There was also a culture of complacency about things going wrong.

like the child o-rings, which went all the way back to the second shuttle mission.

And on the second mission, when they got the boosters back, they inspected the O-rings and found one of them had been damaged by fire.

Shuttle astronaut Mike Malane calls it the normalization of deviance.

And it started repeating in a dozen missions before Challenger showed that there were instances of O-ring anomalies, including burned O-rings.

And

seeing this time after time, these burned O-rings.

people fall in the mode of, hey, let's keep an eye on this, but then after you see it, it's like, oh, we've seen that before.

Slowly and slowly, it became almost expected to see burned O-rings, and that ultimately led to Challenger.

In short, more should have been done way before Challenger.

The flights should have been stopped and the joints redesigned.

There's also the night before Challenger's launch.

Could the engineers at Firecoll have presented their data in a different way?

Shouldn't even inconclusive data have been enough to stop the launch?

Why were the engineers being forced that night to prove it wasn't safe to fly when the default position should have been that you don't fly unless you can absolutely prove it's safe?

Over time, the world found out what really happened, not least because of several whistleblowers at Thiacol and at NASA.

People like Roger Beaujolais and Alan MacDonald.

The shuttle team, who had lost close friends and colleagues, found out alongside the rest of the public.

When we heard

that it was a known problem with these booster O-rings that had gone mismanaged and resulted in the catastrophe, there was disbelief.

I certainly couldn't believe that the NASA NASA I knew could ever have made a mistake like that.

It was that disbelief and there was anger.

You know, anger that it could have, it should not have happened.

I can't answer how everyone else felt.

I can just say how I felt.

Astronaut Anna Fisher.

But I think it's probably a shared feeling and that is disappointment

that

when we finally have an accident, and I don't think anyone ever thought that there would never be an accident, that it was caused by faulty decision-making

rather than just one of those things where something failed and you're doing difficult things.

Yeah, I felt pretty disappointed as they continued to peel the onion back to find that that really was preventable.

Pad leader, Bill Carr.

And you'd have to lay it at the feet of program management and some of the driving forces that drove decisions that ended up being terrible decisions.

When you stand there and you were a part of it like I was,

it really affected me.

In the end, you can look for the reason for Challenger all you want.

But there isn't one moment, one decision, or one person which caused it all.

The fact is, it could have been prevented many, many times along the way.

Man, who doesn't remember that the Challenger blew up at one time?

Even the young people who weren't part of it, most of them at least realized, oh, well, yeah, something happened.

So the point I'm trying to make is that it has become an historical event.

Those of us that were part of it didn't seek to be part of history, and yet we ended up in there.

And so my willingness to speak with you about it is in that sense, that if we don't talk and evaluate what happened, do we just stumble on or do we actually learn something?

Mr.

Chairman, the American people seek answers.

And you, as its selective representatives of this committee, do too.

After the final Rogers Commission report is published,

NASA Administrator James Fletcher accepts its conclusions and recommendations.

And at a committee hearing, he outlines how they will respond going forward.

And I promise that where NASA management was found to be weak, we would strengthen it.

Where engineering or design or process needed improvement or change,

we would do what was needed.

And that where our internal communications, and that includes decision-making, were poor,

they would be made better.

It seemed to me that the Rogers Commission report not only was painstaking as it looked back, but cleared the air, in a sense, for us to move on.

That's next time on 13 minutes.

This has been episode 8 of 10.

Thank you for listening to 13 Minutes Presents The Space Shuttle from the BBC World Service.

It's a BBC Audio Science Production.

I'm Maggie Adarin Pocock.

13 Minutes wouldn't be 13 minutes without the people who made these space stories happen and then shared them with us.

Thanks to every single one of them.

We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound.

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And if you can, leave a rating and review.

Our new 13 minutes theme music for the story of the space shuttle is by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg and produced by Russell Emmanuel for Bleeding Fingers Music.

And the sound design and recreated sound effects for this season are by Richard Gould from Skywalker Sound.

The 13 Minutes series producers are Florin Bohr and Jeremy Grange.

The assistant producer is Robbie Wojciechowski with additional research by Fabry Smallhart.

Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram.

Our story editor is Jessica Lindsay.

The senior podcast producer for the BBC World Service is Anne Dixie.

The podcast commissioning editor is John Monnell.

And the series editor is Martin Smith.

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