In article ,
says...

From Jeff Findley:
In article ,
says...

Congress performed a separate investigation of Challenger. Senator
Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a noted Reagan nemesis, spearheaded the
investigation, specifically looking for White House pressure to
launch. They found none. Among other things, no equipment had been
installed and no communications plans had been established to allow
Reagan in the US Capitol to speak to the Challenger crew live.

"In one heated exchange, Hollings grilled Rogers with questions about
whether the Reagan administration put pressure on NASA to launch
Challenger with New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe on
board to coincide with the president's State of the Union address.

'There just wasn't anything like that happening,' Rogers said.
'There's no evidence in this case.'

Later Rogers angrily snapped: 'If you can prove it, I'll come back
here and apologize!'"

- United Press Int'l, June 10, 1986

The investigation's report was quietly released later in 1986.

Thanks for reiterating this. The pressure to launch was all internal to
NASA.

The fact that evidence has not been brought to light does *not* eliminate the possibility that it happened.

Bull****. It's up to the person with the assertion to support that
assertion with evidence. This assertion *was* investigated at the time
and there was *zero* evidence to back it up. The assertion is false.

I could just as easily assert that the devil did it by taking a bite out
of the o-ring. Since there is no evidence to the contrary (the blow-by
would have burned away the bite marks), the devil surely did it, right?
You can't prove me wrong, so I *must* be right! Note that my assertion
is clear b.s. The same can be said for the assertion that the White
House had any direct influence on the decision for Challenger to fly
because there is zero evidence to back it up.

This is also known as a "conspiracy theory" because if it were true,
everyone "involved" would simply deny it under oath. That's great, in
fantasy land, but when the organization is as big as NASA, "cover-ups"
are very hard to do. Someone, somewhere, would want to tell the truth
and would do so. But that never happened because there was no direct
pressure from the White House.

The White House never really cared about manned spaceflight, except
during the 60's when the Space Race was a proxy war with the Soviet
Union. During the shuttle program, the Russians were flying their Mir
space station, so comparing the two programs was apples and oranges. We
could always say ours was better because of the shuttle, while they
could always say theirs was better because of Mir.

An unanswered question...
If there was no external pressure, then why would NASA have done something so stupid?

This is *not* an unanswered question. The CAIB did a good job covering
this.

Operations bent over backwards to get that shuttle in the air that morning. It is difficult to imagine that the pressure to do so came from within (NASA Administrator or below). Why would the NASA Administrator, or anyone below him, be willing to hang it out so far if there wasn't someone above that pay grade putting pressure on them to do so?

They were "bending over backwards" on every flight leading up to it.

On many flights, NASA was cannibalizing parts off other orbiters to get
the next orbiter ready for flight. There was a clear lack of spare
(flightpath) parts. Since the program was "operational" and the goal
was to ramp up the flight rate, there was a systematic problem with
ignoring trends in data which indicated areas which needed improvement.

Just look at *all* of the systems which were upgraded and changed after
Challenger. It wasn't just the SRBs which needed attention. If the SRB
had not caused loss of life, other problem areas could just as easily
caused injuries or death. For example, brakes were a huge issue. Data
from actual flights, including the condition of the brakes after each
flight, showed a problem. But this was largely ignored before
Challenger. The solution was changes to the brakes, the addition of
nose wheel steering, and the addition of the "drag chute". This added
weight to the orbiter, reducing payload, but it was the right call for
safety.

The entire CAIB report points to the fact that the flight rate was
unsustainable at the staffing levels and funding levels NASA was
getting. Too much resource was focused on flight rate and too little on
safety. This led to a culture of "go fever" in NASA management where
engineers were being asked to "prove it isn't safe to fly" since the
default was "go". The correct safety culture is to default to *not*
flying when there are questions, so that the engineers have to "prove
that it is safe to fly".

Jeff
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