Lofty Ambitions Blog

Guest Blog (2 of 2): Allan J. McDonald January 17, 2011

Today, we have two guest bloggers, both of whom were whistleblowers after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch. The 25th anniversary of this disaster is next Friday, January 28. Both our guest bloggers—Allan J. McDonald and Richard C. Cook—will appear at Chapman University on Monday, January 24, at 2-5pm in Sandhu Conference Center to discuss the tragedy itself and what we can learn from it.

Allan J. McDonald is the author of Truth, Lies, and O-rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. He was the Director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project at the time of the Challenger accident and led the redesign of the solid rocket motors as Vice President of Engineering for Space Operations. He has presented more than eighty technical papers, earned an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering at Montana State University, and is on the Board of Directors at Orbital Technologies Corporation in Madison, Wisconsin. He retired from ATK Thiokol Propulsion in 2001, after forty-two years with the company.

We’ve posted Richard Cook’s guest blog today as well; click here to read that.

TRUTH, LIES, AND THE STATE OF THE U.S. SPACE PROGRAM

I initially wrote most of the material for Truth, Lies, and O-rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster some twenty years ago as if it were an engineering report augmented with sworn testimony from the hearings of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident and the congressional hearings on the results of the Challenger accident investigation. After the first closed executive hearing of the Presidential Commission, I decided I needed to document everything I knew, everything I heard, and much of what was reported in the press and news media concerning the accident and the investigations. When I first revealed to the Presidential Commission that Morton Thiokol initially recommended not to launch the Challenger because of the cold temperatures, right after NASA had just told the commission that Morton Thiokol only recommended to launch, Chairman William Rogers said to me, “Would you please come down here and repeat what you’ve just said, because if I just heard what I think I heard, then this may be in litigation for years to come.” I took his words to heart, because I knew who would be in the hot seat for any litigation to follow: me.

Challenger Explosion January 28, 1986

Some NASA officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and several members of Morton Thiokol senior management were in collusion and were clearly trying to cover up this bad decision to launch, and I had just pulled the cork out of the bottle. When I was demoted by my company for telling the truth to the Presidential Commission, I decided at that time that I needed to document everything to protect myself from any litigation or any further retribution against me from NASA or the company.

I was assigned to lead the nearly impossible task of effectively redesigning the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Only later did I learn that several members of Congress threatened to ban Morton Thiokol from receiving any NASA contracts if the company didn’t reinstate me to a position equivalent to the one that I had before my testimony before the Presidential Commission. Otherwise, my company would never have given me this critical assignment.

Challenger Launch (flame plume visible on SRB)

Truth, Lies and O-rings is the only book that has ever been published by an individual directly involved in the Challenger launch decision and who, then and now, is resolved to tell the truth about this great national tragedy, about the effort to return the Space Shuttle to safe flight once again, and about the warnings that went unheeded in the return-to-flight of the Space Shuttle in 1988 that led to the loss of the Columbia and her crew in February 2003, almost fifteen years later.

The Challenger accident was the major news story of the year in 1986 and captured the nation’s—and the world’s—attention. This was the first time that astronauts were killed in their journey to space in a long history of successful space flights starting with the launch of Yuri Gagarin by the Soviet Union in April 1961, some twenty-five years earlier. The Soviets had lost a cosmonaut in April 1967 when the parachute attached to the space capsule failed to properly deploy prior to touchdown in Russia. Three other cosmonauts were lost in June 1971 when their shirtsleeve oxygen system depressurized on their return to Earth; with no emergency oxygen system available, they suffocated. The U.S. space program had suffered the loss of three Apollo astronauts—Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White—in an electrical fire in their oxygen-filled Apollo capsule during a routine checkout of the capsule on the launch pad in January 1967, but the United States had never lost any astronauts on their way to or home from space.

The U.S. space program had been successful in landing a dozen astronauts on the Moon and returning them home safely since Neil Armstrong first stepped on the Moon in July 1969. The miraculous rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts on their way to the Moon was such an extraordinary feat that it appeared that NASA could never fail or certainly could do no wrong. The Challenger exploding on January 28, 1986, in front of a grandstand filled with the astronauts’ families was so shocking that it took several years for this nation to recover from it, and NASA never did recover from its badly tarnished image.

Guest Blog (1 of 2): Richard C. Cook January 17, 2011

With the 25th anniversary of the explosion of Challenger on January 28, we welcome two guest bloggers today: Richard C. Cook, author of Challenger Revealed, and Allan J. McDonald, author of Truth, Lies, and O-rings.

The Challenger disaster looms vividly in the memories of our generation. Doug had just attended a mechanical engineering lecture at the University of Illinois when a fellow student coming out of the cafeteria asked if he’d heard about Challenger. Anna was working on Knox College‘s literary journal in the publications office. From the adjacent Carl Sandburg Lounge, she heard students gathering in front of the television. We watched the video tape and listened to the broadcast for hours that day.

Richard Cook

Given the place of this event in the history of our own lives, we’re interested to hear from the whistleblowers like Richard Cook, a retired government analyst who now resides in Roanoke, Virginia.  He worked as a policy analyst from 1977 to 2007, spending time with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. He is a lifelong student of meditation, operated an organic farm, and has a new book, We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.

LESSONS OF TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH FROM CHALLENGER

January 28, 2011, marks the 25^th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. A little more than a minute after Challenger was launched at the Kennedy Space Center on that cold winter morning, the Shuttle broke to pieces when an O-ring joint in one of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) failed due to a burn-through. The seven Challenger astronauts died, with some possibly surviving until the crew cabin struck the ocean surface after plummeting 60,000 feet.

It was arguably the greatest tragedy of the space age. NASA and the booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, knew the O-ring joint was flawed. A redesign had been decided on, though flights were to continue while the repair was being implemented.

The night before the launch, engineers from Morton Thiokol argued vociferously that liftoff should be postponed, because they feared unusually cold temperatures would subject the O-rings to hardening and possible failure. Personnel from Rockwell, the orbiter contractor, had their own fears with respect to formation of ice on the launch tower that could crash down on the orbiter when the main engines ignited.

The Thiokol engineers who predicted a rocket failure were overruled by their own management, acting under pressure from NASA. Even though NASA knew the day of the mishap what had caused it, a cover-up began.

But whistleblowers spoke up. In my own case, I had been working in the NASA Comptroller’s office as the lead resource analyst for the SRBs. When a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster, I testified, after leaking some of the O-ring papers to the New York Times, on NASA’s past knowledge of O-ring problems.

With support from some Commission members, the Thiokol witnesses—most notably Al McDonald (see guest post today above) and Roger Boisjoly (see earlier guest post here)—also made known their opposition to the launch. In June 1986, the Commission duly reported on the technical cause of the launch failure.

But presidential commissions are also created to deflect political repercussions. What they did not report was the likely pressure coming from the White House to get the shuttle into orbit so that the Teacher in Space, Christa McAuliffe, would be aloft when President Ronald Reagan gave his state of the union speech that night.

When I wrote my book Challenger Revealed, I proved to my own satisfaction by using information from an interview I conducted of a key eyewitness, that President Reagan himself was likely involved in the faulty launch decision. But I am not a conspiracy theorist, and even though the White House knew that NASA was concerned about the possible effects of the cold weather, there was no evidence they knew the Thiokol engineers opposed the launch for SRB problems that had never been mentioned outside NASA or the Department of Defense.

But there was more to it than that. The Shuttle design had been compromised by decisions to make the vehicle an orbital platform for military missions. Challenger Revealed shows how much of the schedule pressure driving launch decisions in 1985-1986 came from use of the Shuttle for space weapons research under the Reagan administration’s Star Wars program. All this activity was—at least to my mind—illegal in terms of NASA’s 1958 charter for the peaceful exploration of space.

The Challenger disaster was a preventable accident. But the time to point the finger and find fault is long past. Today in 2011 the Shuttle program itself is becoming history. By the time I finished my book in 2006, after working on it on and off for twenty years, I was personally ready to forgive, allow the healing process to take over, and move on. I remain in that frame of mind today. I hope others, too, recognize that everyone did the best we could with the information we had available and the pressures that were brought to bear.

Challenger 51-L Flight Crew

Through such forgiveness and healing we honor the seven Challenger crew members: Commander Dick Scobee; Pilot Michael Smith; Mission Specialists Judy Resnick, Scott McNair, and Ellison Onizuka; and Payload Specialists Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. The lives of these seven highly accomplished and courageous human beings were lost due to some extremely short-sighted and mundane human failings. Though they risked their lives and lost them, I have no doubt they live on in many ways.

Their achievements and what they risked for their values have been a major part of my own adult life and education. Thus for me, recollections of the Challenger disaster have not been something to shrink from. There is much to learn from both triumph and tragedy and many transformative ways to view their meaning. I wish for all such an open-minded attitude of learning and exploration.

Guest Blog: Roger M. Boisjoly November 15, 2010

Roger M. Boisjoly, a retired engineer, is this week’s Guest Blogger. Lest readers think that our Lofty Ambitions’ spectacles became too rose colored during our recent visit to Kennedy Space Center (see our “Countdown to the Cape” series October 27-November 7), we turn to Boisjoly for an examination of the NASA culture. Even Christopher Cowen, our first Guest Blogger (click here) and one of NASA’s biggest cheerleaders, admitted that he is compelled to point out when they make a mistake.

Challenger Explosion (NASA)

Roger Boisjoly worked at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, when Challenger began its doomed STS-51L mission. He warned his superiors of an O-ring problem the year before, in 1985. Cold weather made the problem worse, as the O-rings took longer to adjust and make the necessary seal in the joint of the solid rocket booster. On January 28, 1986, Boisjoly and some of his coworkers raised specific concerns about the near-freezing overnight temperatures at the launch pad and recommended delaying the mission. After phone calls between his superiors and NASA, Challenger launched anyway, and disintegrated less than a minute into the flight. (Click here for our previous post that describes the video record of those moments.) Boisjoly became a witness during the investigation by the Presidential Committee.

Roger Boisjoly continues to lecture on workplace ethics and organizational culture. This past spring, he donated his papers—boxes and boxes from his Morton Thiokol years—to Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University. We met Roger and, with him, held one of those O-rings in our fingers.

U. S. PRODUCTIVITY IN PRIVATE AND GOVERNMENT SECTORS

My engineering career will be characterized as vigorously intrusive, as I purposely tried to learn about the contributions of supporting disciplines to product development. I hoped this knowledge would result in better cooperation between disciplines, short circuit bureaucracy, and produce good products.  This type of work ethic matters because it is becoming extinct today as most managers focus only on short-term profits by disregarding product compliance to specifications, quality, or safety. For example, three of the 14 organizations for which I worked had approximately 1000 employees, and they all produced exceptional products for both commercial and government use. This resulted from teamwork and information flow, coupled with positive perceptions from observations of daily operations performed within the organization that enhanced everybody’s ability to contribute their talents to make great products without oppressive short-term profit management.

In contrast, the remaining 11 organizations in which I worked varied in management style from mild to severely dysfunctional, primarily due to a short-term profit focus, at the expense of employee moral and product excellence. Observations of organizations that treated their subordinate employees as a renewable resource and also would not listen to subordinate input concerning problem resolution were found to have a condition called Malicious Obedience throughout their organizations. This condition resulted in a visible downward spiraling of teamwork and information flow coupled with poor products and loss of market share. Malicious Obedience is the practice of subordinate employees doing only what they are told to do, even when they know that the flawed instructions received will not produce the desired results. When management treated them like replaceable mindless machines, subordinate employees got even this way. As a result, 25% of employees produced 75% of the real productive output, while 75% of employees produced mediocre or less output and became a drain on resources. This exact ratio was presented to a chief engineer at one of these companies; he agreed with my assessment, but did nothing to correct it.

Today, most, if not all, government contractors and commercial corporations are saturated with Malicious Obedience organizations, and the percentage of productive employees is rapidly decreasing. Before anyone concludes that all managers are basically bad and that all other employees are basically good, but are simply misled, it must be stated that the overwhelming majority of employees in management and other positions would like to do the best possible job in making products for the government or anyone else. However, a few upper managers who have the authority and power to promote their own agenda generally control what I call Unethical Oppressive Dictatorship management techniques. This results in daily negative subordinate perceptions that lead to mistrust of management and colleagues. Subsequently, the behavior norm becomes fear of loss of current position; averting the loss becomes the priority for all subordinate daily work decisions.

STS-51L (NASA)

Three mandatory organizational characteristics called Responsibility, Authority and Accoutability are required in any organization to promote ethical practices that produce good products. Responsibility to act within certain bounds must be clearly defined and must be given based upon a person’s ability and willingness to accept it. Once a person has accepted the responsibility for a work assignment, that person must be given the necessary Authority to carry out that work assignment. With Responsibility and Authority agreed upon, the purpose of Accountability must be clearly explained; one must expect to reap the benefits of positive accountability for doing a good job, as well as expecting to receive the blame or negative accountability for doing a poor job, especially for being involved in any type of cover-up of a faulty design or product. Some, and perhaps many, will say such a system cannot work because it is based upon simplistic and naïve principles. Perhaps, but having witnessed and participated in such an environment several times during my career, I know what creates success.

Perhaps many CEO’s in the private sector and administrators in the government sector will reject these and similar suggestions, but let’s ask them what, if anything, they have done in the way of leadership, increasing market share in a weak world economy, long-term stability for their organizations and employees, employee morale, increased productivity, etc. The silent answers to this would be very telling of the disregard for employee and customer welfare.

Apollo 11 Launches (NASA)

My points about Responsibility, Authority, and Accoutability are directly applicable to NASA and to other government agencies. Our government systems of procurement, bidding for contracts, contract specifications, financial contracts, oversight of contracts, and contractor accountability for a variety of misdeeds would be laughable, if it were not in such a mess. To name just a few specifics, all of the following have continued to be a financial disaster for the government for decades: lower-bidder contracting, cost-plus-incentive-fee contracting, combining the financial portion of a contract into the product specifications (thus preventing good oversight), lack of a financial contract consisting of not more than a dozen pages separate from specifications, and so on.

Our aerospace programs are in a shambles at NASA, for all the above reasons and others that have not been mentioned in this piece. NASA started as a non-political non-bureaucratic organization—as demonstrated by the success of Apollo—but it has degenerated into the highly bureaucratic organization that currently exists. For this reason, there is no reasonable connectivity from program to program. This lack of connectivity has damaged our space program to the extent that it may never recover and be able to return NASA’s to former glory days.