44 Replies to ““His job was to sign and submit an official form.””

  1. A few people who weren’t regarded as “team players” by opposing the launch suffered for it. Roger Boisjoly, who was with Morton Thiokol, was blacklisted for having spoken up. Astronaut John Young was critical of NASA and spent the rest of his career sidelined.

    I don’t recall too many people who should have known better, and scrubbed the launch, who were canned or otherwise held responsible.

    I’ve been in too many situations where my job was to do what the boss told me, make him look good, and if things went cockeyed, despite my warnings, to suffer for it.

    1. burton, not men at all….liberals the bunch of them.

      And we are to believe NASA’s goreBULLwarming????

  3. The only reason the Challenger disaster remains a big deal in the globalist press is that it can be used to sully the memory of Ronald Reagan, who obviously had nothing to do with it.

    Soviet cosmonauts were routinely sent to their deaths in space probes using designs stolen by spies within NASA, and manufactured by the same pack of drunken incompetents who ensured that nobody who had any choice would buy anything manufactured in the Soviet Union.

    With few exceptions the deaths of Soviet cosmonauts remain hushed up to this day, the details classified. Even most of the families of the cosmonauts never learned the truth.

    1. We have a dope smoking space man spiff blowing up rockets weekly and the throngs of Muskateers cheer him on for some reason.

      1. Do you understand the purpose of a test program? If rockets aren’t blowing up they’re not pushing hard enough.

        1. There’s the old joke that if something works right the first time, you’ve done something wrong.

        2. The whole purpose of those tests is to see what the hardware can do and how far it can be pushed. Even major aircraft manufacturers deliberately test a new plane to destruction to see what its operating limits might be.

          That what was done in the pre-space days. Test pilots would, and still do, take a new craft out to see if it performs like it’s supposed to, but also to see what happens if conditions are changed.

          When I was a young boy, I read just about every book on the subject that I could lay my hands on. Names such as Chuck Yeager, Arthur “Kit” Murray, Ivan Kinchloe, Mel Apt, and Scott Crossfield were familiar to me. As described in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, those men hung it out there to see what would happen and some of them, like Apt, died trying. He was the first man to fly faster than Mach 3 and was killed in that attempt.

          But they knew there were risks, but they were willing to take them. If they didn’t, no progress would be made.

        3. Space-X is a joke on Uncle Sam’s dime and China is laughing with the real technology.

          1. Is it? SpaceX has succeeded in significantly reducing launch costs to the point that it’s taken business away from companies such as United Launch Alliance. It’s pioneered reusable boosters, something that is being copied by Blue Origin and Rocket Lab. Even the Chinese are rumoured to be looking into developing their own.

            In addition, the company developed, and flew, the Dragon spacecraft, both for hauling freight and passengers, doing so in less time than NASA has spent trying to build the Orion, of which only a boilerplate model has flown–once.

            The Chinese aren’t even close. Their Shenzhou spacecraft is a Soyuz knockoff, originally designed more than 50 years ago. It can’t even be re-used. The Long March series of boosters has had a checkered history, and it can’t be recovered or re-used.

            You call that real technology?

  4. I remember the first shuttle launch. I was 13. Lied to Mom that I wasn’t feeling well so I could stay home from school and watch it. No regrets to this day. It was awesome.

    And then of course I remember where I was and how I found out about the Challenger disaster. Freshman year in college. I had just gotten to the dining hall for lunch and stood in line to get a sandwich and a girl from my dorm said “did you hear?” I said “hear what?” And she said “the space shuttle blew up”. I was devastated.

      1. Wait. What?

        Dammit. OK I have that confused with the parade for the hostages coming back from Iran which was 2 months earlier. That was the day I told my mom I was sick so I could watch the NYC Broadway ticker tape parade. Thank God for fact checkers! LOL

      2. I got up to watch both the first attempt two days earlier and the successful liftoff. I remember that I likely wasn’t the only one interested in the second occasion. A lot of windows in the neighbourhood were lit.

  5. Under “integrity” in the dictionary they should have a picture of Allan McDonald. Godspeed.

  6. THIS. IS. A. MAN. Rest In Peace Allan. He did the McDonald name proud! I remember the morning the Challenger disaster happened almost as clearly as yesterday. I trudged through deep snow in the dark of an early super frigid blustery morning to cut across the big field adjacent to Wascana Creek to make an engineering lab on time. Only about half the class actually made the lab because of the crappy cold weather. I remember one of the other students walking up to me right after I got to a drafting board to ask me if I heard. Not much work got done in that lab and all we could talk about was why it happened and any details anyone in the room happened to hear. That day NASA’s name became smaller. Always seems to happen when the bean counters silence technical fact and common sense.

  7. Scene: Thiokol conference room, booster delivery schedule getting tight, Engineers are doing what engineers do and describe the problem. Mangers aren’t happy. One loses it and screams ” for God’s sake man, take off your engineering cap and put on your management cap!” The rest, they say, is history.

    1. I don’t have any memory of the Columbia disaster that happened in 2003 and also cost seven lives. It’s kind of weird, I was pretty deeply into my job at that time, and traveling overseas a lot, but still.

      1. I was in my 2nd Year at SAIT….we were flabergasted…floored in fact upon hearing the News…I also remember the day JFK was eliminated..

    2. I coined the term “Never Another Shuttle Accident”. Sadly, less than 20 years later, I was proven wrong.

  9. Richard Feynman was on the investigation team and this video has a few interesting points he made. Sorry, it’s CNN, but it also illustrated the distortion the “news” report made of supposed controversy he caused but he clears up. His assessment on management attitudes is sadly common. At 4 min he sums it up as the engineers being the mother warning the child, management, not to play on the road.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kpDg7MjHps

  10. I worked for a contractor to the Challenger program. Mere minutes after it blew up we were inundated with phone and telex messages telling us NOT to speak to any media or we would be summarily ass canned. I know more but wish to keep my yap shut-to this day.

    1. Current mgt direction is to not admit anything. Legal advice to protect liability insurance coverage.

  11. I’d like some engineers like McDonald to stand up and tell the ecotards, politicians and general assholes like Butts & Weirdeau that they’re view of energy is child-like and possible retarded.

  12. It’s too bad that a story about simply doing the right thing now presents as a story of courage.

    1. rd

      I’m sure they’re fully confident that going into space with an “open window” is perfectly safe… Were I selected to go on said mission…I think I would seriously consider NOT.

      The Tacoma Bridge engineers were pretty confident too….

      1. Orion’s been a NASA make-work pork project for close to 20 years. Personally, I doubt it’ll ever fly, let alone successfully. There are far too many things wrong with it to make it viable.

        The last time something like that happened was Apollo 1. Gus Grisson, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died as a result. The subsequent investigation found numerous design and fabrication deficiencies, including a socket left inside a panel.

        As far as Tacoma Narrows, the engineers based their design on the best knowledge and codes that were available at the time. Nobody could have foreseen the wind conditions on the day the bridge failed or, for that matter, how the structure came apart.

  14. Compare the first 50 years of air flight to that of space flight. By 1953 propellers were being supplanted by jets, the modern airframe was near completion, the sound barrier had been broken, transatlantic flights flew regularly. By 2008 the “reusable” shuttle (at 1 billion per flight) was being retired and about to leave the west without manned space flight for a decade, Shortly after the glorious Apollo missions the shuttle was a moderate innovation, then advancement ended. Look up JSC8080 for a list of lessons that NASA learned about manned space flight in the 6 short years leading to the first Apollo flight. Towards 2008 6 years was barely enough to build a vehicle from blueprints.
    The difference was the willingness to experiment. I am not sure where the motto “Failure is not an option” came from – I can’t imagine a better way to discourage innovation. I prefer the other motto – ‘Waste anything but time”. The cost to launch a pound of equipment continued to rise through the shuttle program resulting in ever more careful projects.
    It is heartening to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos scythe through the bureaucracy to restart the aborted space age.

    1. It’s not the first time that the American space program’s been at a loss. The space shuttle was sold as the all-purpose launch solution for everything and, as I’m sure you can remember, it was used to deploy a number of satellites.

      Unfortunately, the expendable launch business was sidelined as a result and, when Challenger went down, the Americans were left without much of a launch capability outside of what was used for the military.

      One of the first to fill that gap was Orbital Sciences (now part of Northrup Grumman) with its Pegasus booster, which was launched from a Lockheed L-1011.

      As a result of that move, the commercial space market is booming. There are now several launch companies doing business, including SpaceX and Rocket Lab. Numerous firms are involved in the design, building, and testing of small satellites.

      What was needed was for government to simply get out of the way.

  15. The motto “Failure is not an option” came from mission control under Gene Krantz. It was his directive to the engineers to get the Apollo 13 astronauts home after the air tank explosion during the mission.

    My dad, who worked on various space projects in his career, spotted the O ring failure in the replay after his second viewing. I remember him saying that their would not be a heat flare in the side of the rocket unless their had been a containment failure.

  16. Do you think that Mr. McDonald’s elementary school teachers made him show his work and get the right answers?

    1. I was brought up with that approach. Show one’s work to prove one’s answer or allow someone to, perhaps, find the mistake if one was wrong.

      I emphasized that with my students at Armpit College. However, not everyone liked that idea, including some colleagues. The latter thought it created more work for them. In some departments where I taught service courses, the administrators weren’t so crazy about that, either, because the kiddies started whining.

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