Originally Posted by
Genghis the Engineer
My take on it, from various reading, is that there were three major reasons why launching was a bad idea...
[snipped]
Whilst not disagreeing with any specific point, in my view it was actually simpler than that. One of the items on the Launch Readiness Review checklist was "Leaking SRB Seals Investigation". This item was ticked "OK" because the investigation was still in progress - to any rational viewpoint it shouldn't have been ticked until the investigation had concluded AND its findings/recommendations implemented. This also slots in nicely with my final conclusion (below). But setting that aside:
(2) The known problems with the O-rings at low temperatures, which had been under investigation at Morton Thiokol for about 7 months. It's well documented that the engineers at MT had made it clear that the launch "go" should not be issued, and that they were overruled by politically minded management in that company.
Strangely enough I'm
less judgemental on that one. If you go through the transcripts you find that MT's initial engineering position was "NoGo", and their management backed them. NASA's response was to push back on this 16 times asking for more data and with their commercial people making elliptical references to the way the SRB contract was up for re-tendering at the time, and how they were looking for a "reliable" supplier as well as the best price.For fifteen of those sixteen push-backs MT's management continued to back the engineers and say "NoGo". Only when the commercial pressure became extreme, with MT's CEO knowing well that losing the SRB contract would cost him his job, did the MT Board put it in similarly blunt terms to their Chief Engineer. You could argue that he shouldn't have caved. As a Chartered Engineer I have signed up to a code of professional ethics which says I would refuse and resign in such circumstances - I can only hope that if I ever find myself in that position I would have the integrity to put my family into dire economic straights and resign. I tell myself I would, but I've never asked myself to prove it...
Anyway, so NASA's response to 17 refusuals is to refuse to accept the decision. But when at the 17th time of asking (with no actual change in the data) MT finally say "OK" they just accept it and press the go button. No one subjects a "go" decision to anything like the scrutiny and due diligence that they applied to the "nogo" decision, thereby proving that NASA had lost its way, and was no longer a fit and proper organisation to hold and engineering or flight-safety governance authority. They had no safety culture, and finance was able to trump engineering science.
That was the real problem IMHO. MT carry some blame, but NASA carry much, much more. That was the conclusion I came to after a few weeks studying the engineering and human iissues involved for that module of that masters.
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