I’ll bet he hated being right when no one would listen.
He should be a named example to everyone, why intellectual opposition should be listened to and not obscured.
If something similar happened today, do you think we would hear about it?
I recently watched a great really long documentary about this launch—it must be hard to be the naysayer but he was right. Like the guy in “The Big Short” (great movie).
And weren’t these O rings/new kind of foam a consequence of a new “green” policy as well?
RIP. And to the crew on the flight as well.
He was held up as an example in my engineering classes back in the day.
And he was. If I remember right, the professional consequences for him were rather harsh for a bit.
Stand for what is right, even if it costs you
The mission was to be the first to carry a civilian into space, a teacher named Christa McAuliffe. President Ronald Reagan was planning to mark that milestone in his State of the Union address, coincidentally scheduled for the same day as the launch.
well done Mr. McDonald. RIP.
too bad the gov’t “experts” (again) wouldn’t listen.
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.
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.
THANKS, I never knew this
He was pushed.
RIP.
Unbelievable! I just told my daughter the story of Allan MacDonald and the Challenger disaster last night.
Richard Feynman is long gone but I’ll never forget his role, by way of a simple experiment on live TV during a news conference, that cold affected the O rings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster#Richard_Feynman
The Challenger disaster hit me hard at the time, not the least of which was because a neighbor (and very nice person) was a teacher in that “Teacher in Space” program.