Posted on 03/22/2016 9:32:05 AM PDT by Kid Shelleen
Bob Ebeling, a Challenger engineer who predicted the space shuttle would explode, never truly forgave himself for the deaths of the seven crew. After three decades of guilt over the disaster, he passed away on Monday aged 89 in Brigham City, Utah, following a long illness. The former engineer for NASA contractor Morton Thiokol was part of a team of four that tried to warn the space agency against the launch, saying the temperatures in Cape Canaveral were too cold for the booster rockets to seal properly.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
No. Wrong shuttle, wrong fault. It was the foam insulation on the external fuel tank that caused the Columbia crash that the EPA was responsible for.
Also wrong. See my post 21.
“So NASA blamed Reagan?”
No, NASA did not blame President Ronald Reagan. The NASA engineers felt internal pressure. The ‘pressure’ they felt was in their minds.
Politicians over-ruled Engineers. Yes, the head of any agency is more a political than a competency issue anymore.
“He tried to warn them about the launch at those temps. He was overruled by NASA.
So why the guilt?”
I hope that he gets his forgiveness soon, and rests in peace. Condolences to his family, you had a good man there.
Really good engineers are conservative by inherent nature; as, consequences of poor judgement drastically affect lives.
Waiting for the consequences of the California political manipulation of the Bay Bridge project...tick-tick.
His forgiveness I don't believe is warranted for he did not do anything wrong.
I agree with you that he was a good man.
I personally know a man who told the manufacturer of the shuttle’s solid rocket booster that their design was unsupportable years before the first one was built. He was VP of engineering for a major elastomer manufacturer, and Thiokol Rocket (before the merger with Morton) had approached him even before the NASA contract was let to offer him a consultancy on the design and manufacture of the solid rocket booster’s O-ring joint. After studying their design proposal, he turned down the fat payday and told them point blank their design was too ambitious relative to what then were state of the art manufacturing techniques. They respected his expertise enough to consider hiring him to oversee the joint’s manufacture, but not enough to act on his advice that their design would be too susceptible to failure.
“His forgiveness I don’t believe is warranted for he did not do anything wrong.”
Maybe not in this instance, but we all do things wrong.
Of course, I could have phrased it better: I hope that he is assured by He Who Knows that it wasn’t his fault, and that his soul derives great comfort from that.
Read the link in my #15
Ironically, the actual destruction of Challenger was just sheer bad luck.
The burn-thru at the SRB joint was completely random and only by bad luck occurred in the roughly 90 degree arc facing the External Tank (ET).
If it had been somewhere along the other 270 degrees, the slight loss of thrust would have been offset by a small gimbaling of the Main Engines (ME) and the Shuttle could have made orbit with little or no change. In fact at the time of the explosion, the ME’s were already moving to offset the loss of thrust.
Instead the flame from the joint cut into the ET and severed one of the lower struts mounting the SRB, resulting in explosion that destroyed the Shuttle.
Feynman did a demonstration with ice water that even the idiots in the press could understand.
The foam had been changed due to environmental concerns to a foam that tended to break away in larger chunks.
...
IIRC, the foam that broke away had nothing to do with any EPA rule changes. I think Rush Limbaugh perpetuated the myth.
The bottom line is the Shuttle was always an unsafe design starting with the Orbiter being place on the side instead of the top.
Emotions can distort thinking.
Because he made the point in a Congressional hearing, in a memorable way. Feynman was a pretty good guy. The world was lucky to have had him. Wiki's take on the role of Feynman in the Rogers Commission Report
Worth a read. Feynman uncovered many institutional problems within NASA.
The EPA-driven disaster was relative to the insulation material on the hydrogen and oxygen fuel tanks, not on the tiles. Chunks of "new" insulation would strip off the fuel tanks, sometimes striking and damaging a tile.
May Bob Ebeling rest in peace and may God bless all the engineers who risk much in the face of all kinds of pressures to just say “yeah, that’s good enough”. There were other engineers involved with Challenger as well who warned of the potential disaster... Wade Robison, Roger Boisjoly, David Hoeker, Stefan Young. Boisjoly ended up testifying before Congress and is probably the most recognizable name out of the group. He died in 2012.
NASA was (still is) exempt from those EPA regulations as a matter of law, and insulaiton from the previous foam insulation was also known to break off.
I see how the news article had to throw Reagan under the bus, just for good measure....
They rolled the dice that day -- 1 in 4 chance that a leak would burn through a strut -- and lost.
But if the leak had been on the outside of the booster, would they have just continued to fly until some future mission failed in the same way Challenger did?
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