From Greg Moo
"Stuf4" wrote in message
...

From Jeff Findley:
In article ,
says...

From Jeff Findley:
snip
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 am aware of zero evidence,
- Therefore the assertion is false

The above is not a sound conclusion.

Yes it is.

Jeff's statement is so blatantly deficient that it can be readily refuted through all of about 60 seconds worth of effort in quoting Wikipedia. Anyone who maintains that there is "zero evidence" to support a strong connection between the White House and the NASA administration, after you've been told the simple facts of that strong connection, are choosing to be willfully ignorant.

"I was on your transition team to become president, and now you've put me in charge of launching your space shuttles."

That is hardly zero evidence. It is what is known as "circumstantial evidence". The fingerprints are found all over it. I would readily agree that the abundance of fingerprints do not constitute proof of external pressure, there is absolutely no basis for making a statement that being covered with fingerprints amounts to "no evidence".

Quite to the contrary, you can have loads of evidence point to one
conclusion, and decades after a case has been closed, they can learn that
everyone was mistaken. The assertion that was discarded as false turned
out to be true.

Then go find the evidence. But no, you haven't done that. No one has done
that. And note Jeff didn't say there was some evidence that was discarded
as false.
He said there was NO evidence. It's not that evidence was found and
discarded. It was that no evidence was found. If say a memo had been found
saying, "The president wants this launch today so he can mention it in the
SOTU" and then people discarded that you might have a point. But there was
ZERO, NADA, NONE. You can't discard what you don't have.

We are talking about the conclusion of investigation reports that tell the story that "The O-rings did it." Quite obviously these official reports were horribly deficient. Yet people with the integrity of Neil Armstrong & Chuck Yeager decided to sign off on that story that they presented to the world.

As for the fact that no memo has been found, you might be aware that presidents typically have a shrewd awareness of how it is smart to remain insulated in certain situations.

I've already explained how the pressure could have been applied with no paper trail at all, strictly through a person-to-person talk. But say that there *WAS* a paper trail...
Is it inconceivable that Nixon can manage to erase tape, while Reagan was incapable of burning a memo?

One obvious possible explanation as to why evidence was not found was because evidence was destroyed. These kinds of things happen, I'm sure Bill Burr would be happy to remind you.

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.

Another huge failure of this forum over many years has been the attitude
toward conspiracy theories. Instead of me repeating what I've shared here
about that in the past, I will offer this from comedian Bill Burr:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIZOHa2kgPo&t=63

Quote: "Conspiracy theory has gotten a bad name..."
"This country [USofA] started with a conspiracy."

In the case of the 51-L launch decision, it does not have to be dozens of
people involved. All it takes to have external pressure is *one* person..
And I've already explained that scenario. The top NASA person does not
have to share his reasons why he needs to have the shuttle launched right
now.

No, it doesn't take "just one person". It wasn't decided that way.

I wasn't there. I don't know for sure.
You, however, appear to be sure in your belief.

As far as everyone else within NASA is concerned, the situation would look
*indistinguishable* from internal-only pressure.

Reagan is dead. So this scenario requires *one person* to keep his mouth
shut.

Right, Reagan got on the phone and called the NASA administrator himself.
Now you're just making up ****.

You don't think presidents make direct phone calls to the top of their NASA administration? My expectation is that type of phone call would hardly be considered unusual. And I say that for *any* person holding the job of NASA Administrator, let alone a *crony* placed in that job.

Let's be clear:
In January 1986, the person who was placed in charge of running NASA was a Reagan crony.

How hard is it to imagine a phone call made by Reagan to his bud? Yes, I would agree that without a phone record, to say that such a phone call happened *would* be making it up.

Notice that I have never presented such a scenario as fact. My point has been that it is not a huge stretch of the imagination to picture such a phone call.

And let's be clear that I did not jump into this thread for the purpose of
promoting any theory that there was external pressure to launch. I entered
this discussion to voice my view on how it is not smart to eliminate any
such theory just because conclusive evidence has not come to light.

And I still believe there's an invisible pink elephant living in your house.
You can't eliminate the theory.

Furthermore, if there was strong circumstantial evidence that pink elephants exist, and that one is living in my house, then I would be quite foolish to eliminate the theory.

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".

Contrary to popular opinion...
The SRB design was actually adequate. They worked successfully on 24
flights. That's 48 successful SRB burns in flight. What proved fatal was
not the o-ring design. What killed the astronauts was failure to respect
the design limits.

No, it did NOT work successfully on 24 flights. Feynman was VERY clear on
this. It didn't fail catastrophically but it did FAIL its design criteria on
a number of flights. Now you've gone from making up evidence to
contradicting the actual data.

I will take this opportunity to retell a very old joke:

Q - "What do you call the person who graduates last in medical school."

A - "Doctor."


Just because several SRBs came *close* to failing does not at all mean they failed. They all succeeded. They all "graduated", if you will. The very reason why the joints were designed with two o-rings was just in case the first one didn't hold.

- The SRB o-rings were a successful design.
- The wheel brakes were a successful design.
- The entire Space Shuttle was a successful design.

This is not to say that it could not be improved upon. But it is irrefutable fact that the entire system as a whole worked successfully 24 times. It worked each and every time the design limits were honored.

And it is very easy to make the prediction that if those design limits were honored in the launch of 51-L, the shuttle would have had 25 straight successful missions.

The reason why that prediction is so easy to make is because even when NASA disregarded the design limits, Challenger came very close to making it into orbit. It was that last wind shear that bit them. Gene Thomas & company rolled the dice, and they very nearly got away with it.

And even with the SRB seal that failed...
There are 360 degrees in a circle. That failure point could have happened at a *majority* of points around that circle, and the worst impact to the orbiter Challenger would have been a slight loss of thrust in getting them to orbit. That seal could have failed in a different point, and they *still* could have had a completely successful mission.

If a non-catastrophic failure had happened that day, it is not hard to imagine that a possible solution NASA would have done was to not change the o-ring seal design at all, but simply to honor the temperature limits back to the region where it has been shown that the seals work effectively.

(Hardly the smartest response, but a possible response.)

I've stated this long ago...
If you hop into your car, start the engine, and then stomp on the gas so
that the revs go well beyond the redline, it is not a big surprise that
your engine will subsequently blow. And then if an investigation is done
and determines that the o-rings on the pistons failed, you are blowing
smoke to tell the world that the reason why your car got destroyed was
because of the o-ring failure. Blaming the destruction on o-rings is a
diversion from the actual cause:

Your wanton decision to disregard design limits.

NO. Wrong. Considering O-rings FAILED on previous flights, the better
analogy is you get in your car, drive within the design parameters to the
store and back and take apart the engine and find the O-rings that were NOT
supposed to be exposed to hot gasses, let alone erode AT ALL, were suffering
damage on a fair number of flights.

So the fact is the SRBs previous to 51-L were NOT operating within spec.
This was quite clear. This had several people worried. And yet, they flew
anyway because the pressure was on to pretend the shuttle was operational
when it clearly wasn't. And as Jeff pointed out, this wasn't the only
critical system that was NOT performing within specs.

Prior to 51-L, the total number of SRB joints that failed in flight was *zero*. This is a fact.

You say "O-rings FAILED". What you are describing is the fact that primary o-rings had experienced blow-by. In all such cases, the secondary o-rings held the seal. This is exactly why the seals were designed with that second o-ring.

An analogy here would be to look at the record of a parachutist...
In 24 jumps, the parachutist lived. Perfectly fine landing. In certain cases, the parachutist cut away from the primary chute and opened the reserve.. Yet still, the record shows a 100% success rate. The very reason why you jump with a reserve is because you might have to use it.

There are many, many cases where reserve parachutes have been used. Nobody says, "GROUND ALL PARACHUTING IMMEDIATELY UNTIL WE REDESIGN THE PRIMARY CHUTE." It is a perfectly fine design that works quite well. If you had to use your reserve, you might decide you don't ever want to jump again, but there will be thousands who will continue to do so on the very same parachute design that was too scary for you.

I will repeat:
- The SRB design was totally adequate.
- The entire space shuttle design was adequate.

Yes, there was huge room for improvement. But it worked.
And it sure worked a lot better when the system was not wantonly over-revved.

~ CT