An engineer who fought hard against the launch of Challenger 10 years ago has fears about the safety of today's redesigned shuttle system.
Even though the Challenger's propulsion system has been completely re-engineered, Roger Boisjoly thinks the joint at the nozzle has a terrible design."And that's one of the reasons I don't watch the launches anymore," he told the Deseret News late last week. "Any time you have a Murphy's law engineering on anything, be it a toaster or a spacecraft, you're just begging for a failure on Murphy's timetable . . . "
As Boisjoly summarizes it, Murphy's law is the parable that says, "If something can go wrong, it will."
Today Boisjoly has built a business for himself as a consulting engineer. He works for attorneys involved in product liability litigation and lectures extensively in the United States and other countries about professionalism and ethics.
The Challenger disaster is the main example in these lectures.
Ten years ago, he had a promising career with Thiokol. But he says that after his pre-launch concerns about Challenger became known, his career was basically over. Worse, many of his neighbors also worked for Thiokol, and some became so hostile about his criticism that, he says, he was forced to move.
"I was treated very poorly in my community," he said.
Today Boisjoly is weary of talking about Challenger. But he feels so strongly about the disaster, that soon he is talking about that terrible night.
Boisjoly was among a group of Thiokol engineers in Brigham City who - in the words of one - "fought like hell" the night before the fatal Challenger launch to prevent the lift-off. They had feared that the unprecedented cold at Cape Canaveral, Fla., would damage the O-rings in the booster rockets that Thiokol built in Utah.
In fact, they knew that in a previous launch when the shuttle took off in 53-degree temperatures, half of the O-rings in both solid rockets were damaged. This time, the launch was to take place in temperatures in the 30s, and the engineers were terrified.
A group including Boisjoly had huddled urgently and decided the spacecraft should not launch under those conditions, even though the lift-off had been delayed several times already. One of them later quoted a NASA official as objecting, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch - next April?"
On Jan. 28, a few hours after the worried engineers were overruled, they gathered in a conference room to watch the launch live. One recalled his relief when the shuttle left the pad. Another turned to him, celebrating, "We made it! We made it!"
But a few seconds later, the shuttle exploded, taking the lives of astronauts Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Michael Smith and Dick Scobee.
"And we all knew exactly what happened," one of the engineers recalled a month after the explosion.
Boisjoly is not haunted by the Challenger disaster: He did all he could to stop it.
"Well, it cost me my career (to oppose the launch and talk about it later), but I would do it again in a minute because I'm a right-wrong type of guy, and what they did was wrong."
The central mystery isn't what happened but why it did. The Challenger launch could have waited until better weather; with engineers fighting the lift-off, why wasn't it postponed? "If I would have to assign blame . . . I assign 75 percent to Thiokol, 25 percent to NASA for making the pressure on the company" to launch then, he said.
The shuttle's twin boosters were Thiokol's hardware and design, he noted. Its own engineers fought to prevent the launch.
Then company officials turned around and decided to launch "because the customer pressured them." The customer was NASA, acting on behalf of the federal government as a whole.
"They all deny it, but I was there," he said.
Boisjoly noted that on a recent broadcast of the CBS television investigative program "60 Minutes," Christa McAuliffe's mother related that the night before the launch, McAuliffe - who was to be the first teacher in space - told her family that the launch would go the next day no matter what.
"That had already been decided," Boisjoly said.
"You know the pressure came from somewhere. The teacher in space was President Reagan's idea, we're talking about a launch the day of the State of the Union address, we're talking about the biggest public relations opportunity since the man on the moon.
"Think about it."
Does that mean the pressure Thiokol ultimately felt came from the Reagan administration? Boisjoly says he could make a case for that, and also for the argument that "the pressure could have come from NASA all by themselves . . .
"Being mentioned in the president's State of the Union address was no small public relations coup," NASA officials may have believed, he said.
"It was a time when the American public was ho-hum with the space program . . . This was a way, in their minds, for them to restore public interest and possibly public support for the space program."
During a period when the budget for space exploration was shrinking, he speculates, NASA officials may have felt a successful launch would get the shuttle included in the speech and help rekindle the kind of public support that is translated into appropriations dollars.
When Boisjoly lectures to college students, he uses the Challenger tragedy as a "prime example of what will happen if you don't do the right things in organizations."
He sets the stage for the lecture by giving a factual rundown about what happened before the fatal launch, he said.
"If we don't learn from past disasters, then we're bound to repeat them," he said.
So has the space program learned the lesson it should have from Challenger? "No, we haven't. We haven't at all. NASA's still placing too many risks on the astronauts when they fly."
The astronauts have faced many such risks in the 10 years since the blast that rocked America, according to Boisjoly. Pressure is still exerted on the space program to take action when prudence may dictate caution, he said.
"The pressure has its root in schedule and cost . . . They're under tremendous budget restraints and when serious problems come up, do their cosmetic job, rather than a full-blown investigation," he said.
According to Boisjoly, an example of that was when a mismatch in thrust between the two boosters was detected about two years ago. The mismatch exceeded the official specifications.
"So they just changed specifications," he charged.
If a specification is good originally, he asked, why should they be relaxed? "There must be something wrong, if you're not meeting it."
Performance specs are written with values that are supposed to provide a base line of safety, he said.
"And when you start to tamper with specifications in a program that's matured, you don't know what you have anymore," Boisjoly added.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
On the inside
- Young witnesses carry memories of that day, not scars/A6
- Idaho teacher still has her sights set on space 10 years later/A6