Posted on 03/09/2021 6:04:27 PM PST by nickcarraway
They act like Reagan personally wanted it to go ahead because of a couple lines in his speech. NASA has a decades long history of putting bureaucratic glory over safety.
The managers didn’t want to have a scrubbed launch on their record. It meant their careers to them. To Reagan, it meant a quip during a speech.
Not many aircraft can handle a 1,300,000 pound payload.
It’s Nasa they could make a Hot Air balloon
If NASA had picked a company near the coast, they could have shipped them on the ocean and wouldn’t have needed the O-rings. At least that’s what I’ve read.
If the dog hadn’t stopped to pee he’d have caught the rabbit. Christa and the rest can’t care.
Engineers are often faced with huge pressures to cut corners that create unacceptable risks but Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly were the two at Morton-Thiokol who didn’t stop sounding the alarm about the low temperature O-ring problems, even when their dissent resulted in great personal cost.
A great speech to list to is one that Roger Boisjoly delivered at MIT in 1989. It was entitled “Engineering Ethics: Constructive Responses to Difficult Situations”.
RIP. I was working at JFK airport for Fedex that day, back then it was Federal express and I would unload the planes. For some reason that morning January 28, 1986 this freak snow storm started that made visibility almost zero, and as the plane was being marshalled in the lead guy couldn’t see the other guys standing by the wing tips who would warn him if something was in the way. Well El Al was right next to us and the day before some idiot who worked there left a loader lifter on the tarmac and guess what happened? Craaaack, half the freakin wing got torn off. So for the rest of the day we had the FAA and NTSB guys came in investigating, everyone thought they were going to get fired, and in a room there was a TV and I saw the Challenger explode and nobody paid attention to it, same freakin’ day. I’ll never forget that, not a good day.
Many MANY years ago, back in the day when presentations were still done on overhead slides, I attended a graphics seminar by Edward Tufte. He maintained that the Thiokol engineers had all of the data and statistical analysis to convince anyone with sense not to launch, but they did not present it in a way that managers understood. He was an advocate of graphic data presentation designed to convey the proper information in ways that would get attention. Really made an impression on me.
I remember that day well....
We live close enough to KSC that we usually walk out to our backyard to watch the launch soon after it happens
It was a bitter cold morning so I didn’t go out.....
I watched on TV till I realized something had gone wrong
THEN I went outside and saw the crazy contrails going every which way
Our county was in mourning for a long time
I was painting our daughters room and my dad called and said the Challenger had blown up......I said it did not. He said yes....I walked over to my parents house next door and stuck to the TV the rest of the day.........horrible, like the assassination......;(
I love Tufte’s books. If you’ve never read his Powerpoint is Evil essay, you must. Ping me if you can’t find it and I will.
He also does some interesting sculpture art. Has a big farm in CT with a lot of really big stuff that used to be opened up a weekend a year, and used to have a gallery on the West Side of Manhattan, may still. It was cool looking through it.
If only they had muslim outreach back then, this would not have happened.
I knew they’d make him pay, just didn’t think it would take so long.
They had been burning through o-rings prior to the
Challenger. They knew it was only a matter of time until it burned through in the wrong place. They knew what would happen when it did.
Within a half hour of the terrible event, brokers on Wall Street were joking on the phone with this gag:
“Do you know what NASA stands for? ... Need Another Seven Astronauts!”
I’ll never forget.
Here’s to ENGINEERS !! I’ve saved many a life through knowledge !
Electrical safety and insisting on FOLLOWING PROTOCOL
ROOF AND LADDER SAFETY
LIFT GRADALL AND MACHINE SAFETY
CHEMICAL SAFETY. MSDS KNOWLEDGE. Avoiding explosions !!
LOTO procedures!
I remember that.
Bump
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