Letters Helped Challenger Shuttle Engineer Shed 30 Years of Guilt
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Speak out if you see something wrong, no matter what the profession.
Speak out with a passion.
Because not doing so will end in traumatizing guilt, which Mr. Ebeling was fighting with for so long, despite doing so.
The fantastic quote by Charlie Bolden:
"We honor [the Challenger astronauts] not through bearing the burden of their loss, but by constantly reminding each other to remain vigilant," the statement read. "And to listen to those like Mr. Ebeling who have the courage to speak up so that our astronauts can safely carry out their missions."
The statement from Bolden is particularly meaningful. Nobody can speak for the people who died on the flight, but as a contemporary colleague he can reflect on what they may have thought, as astronauts and test pilots.
(I've known him for about ten years -- he attends a small church in Brigham City where my father-in-law is the pastor. From what I understand, even most of his closest friends had no idea.)
Although this is maybe bit off topic, From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process "While NASA would likely have chosen liquid boosters had it complete control over the design, the Office of Management and Budget insisted on less expensive solid boosters due to their lower projected development costs"
The real issue was that it had to be built large enough to carry military payloads or else congress would not fund it. That really forced a lot of terrible design compromises.
I would tell Bob to not feel guilty, the ones that need to feel guilty are the politicians and OMB people who boxed the engineers into a corner.
It will be interesting to see if the private sector who is taking a lot of this development over will be safer.
Just my 2 cents.
https://blogs.stockton.edu/hist4690/files/2012/06/Edward-Tuf...
The problem wasn't that the right people didn't know the danger. The problem was that they had enormous political pressure on them to move forward, and they were able to discount the danger in their own minds and fail to stop the launch despite being informed.
Doesn't Musk/Space-X now review any launch if anyone has a concern? What does NASA now do?
Those graphs are an embarrassment ... they certainly collected far more data than depicted there.
And there should have been pre-launch documentation of what the acceptable minimum operating temperature. Do you really think that any of the shuttle parts were mfg. without temp and vibration data?
I think you're right they should feel guilty, not because they didn't argue hard enough to stop the launch, but for knowingly allowing a flawed SRB design to stay in service for so long. It was a well-known fact that the o-ring design was flawed, even before the first shuttle launched. In several launches, the joints in the SRB flared out, causing leaks, but luckily the o-ring slipped out of its groove and sealed the joint. This was not part of the design, but they change the spec to account for this unintended effect.
This is why they should feel guilty. Instead of fixing the flaw, they counted on a Rube Goldberg-like sequence of events to fix it.
But, hey, the shuttles didn't blow up prior to Challenger, and certainly nothing short of a catastrophe would have motivated NASA to pay for such an expensive undertaking, there was no "allow a flawed SRB design to stay in service", that wasn't their decision, as show in the meetings before the fateful launch. As it was, the SRBs were hacks designed to decrease development costs vs. safety or cost in operation.
I think the term for that is normalization of variance. If my buddy has driven drunk many times and not killed anyone, then he can drive drunk tonight and not kill anyone. Except tonight he drives drunk and kill 7 people. The sin here is in letting someone amass a history of drunk driving incidents.
The issue I think wasn't raised was that all the successful launches before Challenger were outliers...the engineers knew it and instead of raising the issue early and saying the o ring implementation was effectively duct tape, they changed the spec to allow for extrusion and slipping of the o ring.
In fact, on the day of Challenger's fateful launch, Thiokol engineers were relieved, and even congratulated each other that the shuttle even made it off the launchpad. Despite the expansion in the joint, and o ring failure, aluminum oxides filled the joint, sealing it. If not for abnormally strong wind shear, this seal might have held, and the disaster might not have happened. In this alternate timeline, would Thiokol and NASA have ever addressed the issue?
They did. They argued that the booster was unsafe at any temperature, but were overruled when NASA demanded proof that it was unsafe - a clear inversion of the correct burden of proof. It was the breakdown in the safety culture at NASA that led to this inversion, and not anything that anyone at Thiokol did or didn't do, that was the root cause of the accident. That made some sort of catastrophic failure almost inevitable.
Having lost this battle, the engineers were left the night before the launch to argue on much narrower grounds, and with an extreme paucity of data, that the launch was unsafe at the prevailing temperature even if it wasn't at a more usual temperature. (Even today it's not clear to me how big this effect was - remember that the expansion rate of the O-ring was insufficient to deal with the opening rate of the joint at any temperature.) Once again they were overruled, and the rest is history.
It's possible to argue that the engineers should have brought all the data they had to bear and attempted to relitigate the safety of the entire booster design the night before the launch. (I think Tufte's case in Visual Explanations basically boils down to this.) But it's not at all clear that this would have been successful, or even permitted.
You're correct that Challenger would likely have escaped but for the windshear. I'm almost certain, however, that recovery of a booster with the entire O-ring burned through for the first time would have have prompted some kind of action. Whether that would have lead to a complete redesign or just launch temperature restrictions that would have only delayed rather than prevented a catastrophic failure, we'll never know.