STS-51L Challenger: Rogers Commission was staged

Richard Cook published this month a book on the Challenger accident. See
www.richardccook.com

This old article by him was already a surprise. After reading a lot of
official papers I thought I know most hidden things on the topic. Faar
from it! Seems the press in 1986 got the crucial things the officials
later tried to hide. [[Comments by myself]]


http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...v18/ai_4539825

The Rogers Commission failed; questions it never asked, answers it didn't
listen to - Challenger accident

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1986 [[!]] by Richard Cook

....
The commission left unchallenged statements by NASA officials that were
contradictory and often obfuscatory. Indeed, at times the commission seemed
to be coaching NASA witnesses on how to deal with tough public questions.

....

[[leaks by press that NASA was well aware of serve O-ring problems for
quite some time]]

With such news, one might expect the commission to have chastised NASA
officials for not describing during the first hearing the seriousness of
the past O-ring problems and for not correcting those problems prior to
the last shuttle launch. Instead, it seems to have coached them on how
to avoid embarrassment when the information became public.

In the February 10 closed [!] meeting, after Jesse Moore had conceded the
basic accuracy of the Times story, Rogers appears to have counseled him on
how to handle potential tough questions about why the agency didn't correct
the O-ring problems if they were aware of them. Rogers said to Moore. "Now,
everybody recognizes that you are going to make mistakes in judgment, but
at least you have to show that it wasn't done in a careless fashion and
that there were meetings and you thought about it and who was there and
things of that kind.' ... That would be a devastating comment. I think
the answer to that is, "We're not sure yet; that is what we're studying.''
[[So Rogers gives answers to NASA officials for questions he will present
in later public meeting]]

Another commission member, Maj. General Donald Kutyna, said to Michael
Weeks, Moore's deputy, "My problem is The New York Times kind of problem.
Here it says that Cook says it's going to be catastrophic, and here is
another guy who says loss of mission, vehicle, and crew [the formal
description of what would happen in the event of O-ring failure]. Somehow
we've got to be able to explain in the open session tomorrow why this
is different from what you said [that the O-ring problems didn't
constitute a serious "safety of flight' issue].'

At another hearing, after being told that Rockwell engineers had opposed
the launch, Rogers said, "If Rock well comes up in a public session and
says, "We advised NASA not to launch and they went ahead anyway,' then we
have a problem.'
....
As testimony and press reports increasingly pointed to NASA's early
knowledge of the O-ring problems, the commission became less and less
protective.
....

After months of accumulating evidence--some of it uncovered by the
commission--that showed that virtually the entire NASA bureaucracy knew
about the O-ring problems, the final report insisted that the top-level
officials who launched Challenger "were unaware of the recent history of
problems concerning the O-rings and the joint.'

The evidence to the contrary is now abundant. To start, there were the
statements of Aldrich and Lovingood in the early hearings, the Times
article, and my memo. During the February 11 open hearing, which the report
does not even mention, Lawrence Mulloy told the commission that the April
1985 launch had caused erosion in the secondary O-ring, meaning the
primary O-ring had failed completely. In addition, O-ring charring was
a major agenda item on all Jesse Moore's monthly staff reviews during
1985, according to documents released by NASA.

While at NASA headquarters, I worked almost daily with headquarters
engineers who worked for Moore and had been deeply involved in review of
the O-ring problems during 1984 and 1985. It was one of these engineers
who told me in mid-1985 that they "held their breath' with each shuttle
launch because of the O-rings, a statement I passed on to the press and
the commission. The report also doesn't mention that I told them on
March 28 that a top solid rocket engineer had been advised not to list
O-ring charring on headquarters meetings as it was considered too
sensitive an issue to put in writing.

To assume that Moore never knew of the seriousness of O-ring problems
means assuming, among other things, that he was oblivious to the
activities and concerns of his own engineers.
.....
Moreover, for five to six hours the morning of the launch, Reinartz and
Lucas worked next to Aldrich and Moore, yet all parties claimed that not
a word was spoken of the O-ring controversy that had consumed approximately
ten hours of discussion the previous afternoon and night.
Although their description of events is hard to believe, it is also hard to
disprove--in part because the commission was so timid in its questioning
of witnesses.
....
Then, just as Rogers had been getting at an important issue--what Reinartz
told his superiors about the raging Thiokol debate--the chairman ended
the discussion. [[Like he did as Feynman began to question Mulloy]]

....
There is other testimony that reinforces the possibility that there was
a cover up. For example, Allan McDonald, the Thiokol engineer who had
objected to the take-off for safety reasons, testified that Lawrence
Mulloy, the NASA official who aggressively pushed for the launch, had
later tried to intimidate him. "Mulloy came into my office and slammed
the door,' McDonald said during the May 2 hearing, "and as far I was
concerned, was very intimidating to me. He was obviously very disturbed
and wanted to know what my motivation was--and I won't use his exact
words--for doing what I was doing [cooperating with the
commission] . . .. He said . . . "As I understand it, you're giving
information to the commission without going through your own management,
without going through NASA and what's your motivation for doing that?'
....
Commissioner Robert Hotz then asked, "Did you get the feeling that there
might be some feeling on the part of the Huntsville [The Marshall Space
Flight Center] people that they wanted to control this flow of information
to the commission?' McDonald responded: "I got the feeling that was
happening.'

Then there is the letter written by a Marshall employee, signed,
melodramatically, "Apocalypse.' Such an anonymous letter should be read
skeptically, though this one seems to have accurately predicted NASA
officials' behavior. The letter's author, who displayed an intimate
knowledge of Marshall managerial process and past booster rocket problems,
gives a detailed description of a private meeting he claims was called
by William Lucas at the Marshall Center, at which plans for a cover-up
were laid out:

"Under Phase I of the cover-up, information was to [be]
withheld as long as possible then fed to the press piecemeal. It was
reasoned that the longer the information could be covered up the better,
as the course of world events would eventually tend to dilute the initial
shock and public reactions. . . . Once data could no longer be held back,
Phase II would be to present as much highly technical data as possible,
letting the situation in the general public's mind be diluted by various
conflicting theories which were sure to result. Stories were to be planted
which would serve to shift the blame away from [Marshall Space Flight
Center] to Thiokol and the contractors doing the processing at the Cape.'
[[Feynman in his book mentioned a memo feed to him to keep his focus on
the processing at the Cape]]

The closest the Rogers Commission report came to reprimanding NASA for
being less than forthcoming was the sheepish acknowledgement that "for
the first several days after the accident-- possibly because of the
trauma resulting from the accident--NASA appeared to be withholding
information about the accident from the public.'
....
[[More evidence that President Reagan`s State of the Union address caused
the launch pressure]]


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