Thirty-seven years ago, on this day, January 27 1986, engineers at the company Morton-Thiokol were begging their own bosses, and NASA administrators, to delay the launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle. They feared it could explode on the launch pad, because seals keeping fuel away from air were not going to work because the rubber they were made of had lost its elasticity, thanks to unexpected sub-zero temperatures in Florida.
As per the Wikipedia entry about one of the engineers, Roger Boisjoly.
Following the announcement that the Challenger mission was confirmed for January 28, 1986, Boisjoly and his colleagues tried to stop the flight. Temperatures were due to fall to −1 °C (30 °F) overnight. Boisjoly felt that this would severely compromise the safety of the O-ring and potentially the flight.
The matter was discussed with Morton Thiokol managers, who agreed that the issue was serious enough to recommend delaying the flight. NASA protocols required all shuttle sub-contractors to sign off on each flight. During the go/no-go telephone conference with NASA management the night before the launch, Morton Thiokol notified NASA of their recommendation to postpone. NASA officials strongly questioned the recommendations, and asked (some say pressured) Morton Thiokol to reverse its decision.
The Morton Thiokol managers asked for a few minutes off the phone to discuss their final position again. The management team held a meeting from which the engineering team, including Boisjoly and others, were deliberately excluded. The Morton Thiokol managers advised NASA that their data was inconclusive. NASA asked if there were objections. Hearing none, NASA decided to launch the STS-51-L Challenger mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 348.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was NASA was under a lot of pressure to launch, because of previous delays and because there was a civilian – a teacher called Christa McAuliffe – on board.
What I think we can learn from this
Hierarchies are “reality distortion fields”. But reality – especially physics and chemistry – will impinge, sooner or later.
It’s probably a good idea to listen to scientists and engineers who say something is really unsafe.
There is such a thing as “organisational decay” – Organizational decay is a condition of generalized and systemic ineffectiveness. It develops when an organization shifts its activities from coping with reality to presenting a dramatization of its own ideal character. In the decadent organization, flawed decision making of the sort that leads to disaster is normal activity, not an aberration. Three aspects of the development of organizational decay are illustrated in the case of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They are (1) the institutionalization of the fiction, (2) personnel changes in parallel with the institutionalization of the fiction, and (3) the narcissistic loss of reality among management.
What happened next
In case you didn’t know, the Challenger was torn apart 73 seconds into its flight.
Boisjoly spent the rest of his life trying to get other people to learn from what had happened. By all accounts, a mensch.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References and further reading
30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself
Schwartz, H. 1989. Organizational disaster and organisational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3, pp.319-334.
And a blog post of mine, inspired by reading Schwartz
