Posted on 03/10/2021 10:11:57 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
On Jan. 27, 1986, Allan McDonald stood on the cusp of history.
McDonald directed the booster rocket project at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol. He was responsible for the two massive rockets, filled with explosive fuel, that lifted space shuttles skyward. He was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch of the Challenger "to approve or disapprove a launch if something came up," he told me in 2016, 30 years after Challenger exploded.
His job was to sign and submit an official form. Sign the form, he believed, and he'd risk the lives of the seven astronauts set to board the spacecraft the next morning. Refuse to sign, and he'd risk his job, his career and the good life he'd built for his wife and four children.
"And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime...I refused to sign it. I just thought we were taking risks we shouldn't be taking."
McDonald persistently cited three reasons for a delay: freezing overnight temperatures that could compromise the booster rocket joints; ice forming on the launchpad and spacecraft that could damage the orbiter heat tiles at launch; and a forecast of rough seas at the booster rocket recovery site.
Twelve days after Challenger exploded, McDonald stood up in a closed hearing of a presidential commission investigating the tragedy. He was "in the cheap seats in the back" when he raised his hand and spoke...
"There are two ways in which McDonald's actions were heroic," recalls Mark Maier, who directs a leadership program at Chapman University and produced a documentary about the Challenger launch decision.
"One was on the night before the launch, refusing to sign off on the launch authorization..." Maier says. "And then afterwards in the aftermath, exposing the cover-up that NASA was engaged in."
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_J._McDonald
After his testimony, McDonald was demoted from his position at Thiokol.[2] Neufeld says he “was treated as a traitor and pariah by NASA and his own company, but, thanks in part to congressional pressure, was allowed to redesign the boosters ...”[11] Members of Congress threatened to prevent Thiokol from gaining future NASA work, leading the company to back down. McDonald was promoted to vice president and put in charge of the redesign and requalification of the solid rocket motors.[1][2]
This man was a Patriot. He did his best to try to save those lives.
No one at his company listened to him. And punished him afterward.
RIP Patriot.
At the time of the Challenger Disaster I was working on the West Coast Shuttle Project, and the week before the disaster, the Safety Director there resigned saying that he would not be part of an endeavor that would inevitably get people killed. Sadly, he was too prophetic. The whole Shuttle program was riddled with problems caused mostly by schedules and egos.
"Regret for things we did is tempered by time," McDonald said, his expression firm. "But regret for things we did not do is inconsolable." McDonald then paused and added, "That's absolutely true."
He's right on both statements and I wish I'd known that when I was a dumb teenager.
Thank you for posting.
Manned space flight is such folly. We need to divide the money we spend on it and use half to bolster the unmanned probes that have brought us so much knowledge, and spend the other half on basic physics. If we are ever going to do space travel the way most people imagine it, we are going to need warp drive, artificial gravity, “shields” to ward off radiation and matter traveling to relativistic speeds, and all the rest of the sci-fi stuff. We have no idea how to do any of that, so we better start now to figure that out.
We have been fortunate up to this point because space tragedies happened and were over with immediately. Wait until we have someone orbiting Mars with no way to leave and we sit here for months watching the CNN Mars Death Clock while their oxygen and other supplies slowly run out. I think we really need to avoid that.
Ping.
Thanks for the heads up. 36 years on it(?😱). I was in New Orleans working external tanks that day. Transferred to KSC after that for “return to flight”.
Nah, Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.
I saw him speak in LA a few years ago. He and a few other engineers took some heat for speaking out. RIP.
Save
The whole Shuttle program was riddled with problems caused mostly by schedules and egos.
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...and an intrinsically flawed design that placed the shuttle alongside the main fuel tank of the main booster and the two solid propellent boosters. This created two potential fatal flaws, each of which caused the catastrophic failure on two of the shuttles.
In earlier designs like Saturn or Atlas, the crew capsule sat atop the boosters and the capsule included a launch escape system (LES) which could propel the capsule up and away from a failing or exploding booster. The challenger took the brunt of the explosion of the two solid booster engines.
The main fuel tank on a liquid propelled rocket inevitably sheds ice buildup on launch as water freezes out on the surface due to the chilled liquid rocket propellent. When the capsule rides atop the booster, the ice falls harmlessly. In the case of the later Columbia shuttle disaster, chunks of ice fractured or damaged the heat absorbing tiles on the bottom of the shuttle. There was enough damage that a hole in the shielding allowed the superheated air of reentry to penetrate the hull destroying the shuttle.
In the case of the later Columbia shuttle disaster, chunks of ice fractured ...
The whole Shuttle program was riddled with problems caused mostly by schedules and egos.
I disagree. The shuttle program worked exactly as advertised/designed/built. It was designed, built and sold as a 98% effective system. 126 flights. 124 successful ones.
98.4% success rate. Just what they paid for. They would not risk a 95% success rate and could not afford a 100% success rate. That was the only way they were ever going to have a shuttle fleet.
it was foam.
The boosters did not explode. The leaky seal burned through a support strut and caused the booster to rotate into the main fuel tank.
I think that you intended to direct that comment at someone else. ;)
And, as I recall, foam that broke away because the original formulation of insulating foam had been changed due to environmental concerns, making it more “environmentally friendly” but weaker.
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