On January 28th, 1986, the Challenger took off at 11:38am, and promptly exploded 75 seconds later. This horrible tragedy took the lives of seven people, including a high school teacher. But worst of all, it was something that could have been prevented. The night before the launch, a meeting was conducted to determine if it was safe to launch. Issues were brought up due to such low temperatures; there were concerns that the O-ring seals would not hold in colder temperatures. The coldest temperature they rockets were tested in was 54 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the engineering company who manufactured the rockets, Morton Thiokol. The temperature that day was below freezing. The decision to ignore these concerns and go ahead with the launch then caused the death of those seven people.
The night before the launch, a call did take place that was supposed to determine if the launch would happen or not. But the call might as well not have happened. Roger Boisjoly and other engineers alerted NASA to the risks with the O-rings in low temperatures. He claims to have even reported this issue to managers the year prior, and an investigation reveals that NASA was aware of the issue as far back as 1977. Although Boisjoly wrote a memo about the issue, “The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order — loss of human life”, and yet at NASA it was regarded as an “acceptable error”. This disparity in categorization of this issues could have been caused by many things, one of them simply being culture.
The idea of “groupthink” is brought up in How Challenger Exploded, and Other Mistakes Were Made. It is describes as a “mode of thinking” where in a tight-knit group, members are more inclined to have a unanimous voice rather than bring up opposing ideas and cause a disturbance. From the readings, it seems that this could describe the environment around NASA. When talking about that infamous phone call the night before the launch, Allan McDonald, who was also labelled a “whistleblower” for this incident, said “It wasn’t what they wanted to hear,” when talking about urging NASA to postpone the launch. That idea that they needed to tell NASA what they wanted to hear is a huge concern. Especially when pleasing NASA comes before the lives of people. This was something that Boisjoly and McDonald wanted to be sure was brought to light.
Boisjoly and McDonld made a very brave decision when deciding to come forward with this information. They risked their jobs and reputations, which ended up being a very real risk because they were treated as lepers and black-balled from the space industry. I am thankful for the sacrifices they made in deciding to “blow the whistle”. I believe in situations like this people need to be held accountable. Before they went forward, it was looking like the O-ring issue was going to be swept under the rug, as well as the fact that it was brought up and then promptly ignored. Situations like this should not occur in the future, although we already know that it did happen again with NASA and the re-entry of Columbia in 2003. Even though it seems as though the Challenger events were unable to prevent something like Columbia from happening, I am hopeful that there have possibly been other engineering failures that were listened to, and would have otherwise been ignored.