New Spin on Challenger 1986

On Mon, 7 Mar 2016 03:38:00 -0800 (PST), Stuf4
wrote:

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

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl Sagan

You can say Elvis secretly fired a laser given to him by aliens of
Zeta Reticuli, thereby destroying Challenger. But you need evidence to
be taken seriously. Like the politically-motivated "Reagan did it!"
theory, there is no such evidence.

But worse for your argument, there is a _ton_ of evidence that NASA
brought it on themselves.

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

Because they were trying to prove that the Space Shuttle was the
cost-effective, reliable launch service they had sold the system to
Congress and the American public as. To do that, they had to launch
often (amortizing the expensive infrastructure costs over as many
flights as possible.) 1986 had a manifest of 18 launches scheduled.
Challenger's doomed flight had already been delayed a week mostly
because of major delays with the preceeding flight (Columbia's
STS-61C.) And even more pressure came from the need to get Challenger
up and back as quickly as possible so that it could be modified to
carry the Centaur upper stage needed for the Ulysses launch to Jupiter
scheduled for May.

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,

There was no NASA Administrator at the time of Challenger. The
previous Administrator, James Beggs, had resigned to fight corruption
charges (of which he was later exonerated.) Graham, previously Deputy
Administrator, filled in as Acting Administrator. But An Acting
Administrator doesn't have nearly the power of someone officially
appointed to the job and confirmed by the Senate.

And that was a big part of the problem. There was no one at the top.

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?

Because the pressure was coming from within NASA.

And who was running NASA in Jan 86?
"William Robert Graham...
After Challenger, Graham got fired from his job.

No, he didn't. He was only Acting Administrator and had not been
confirmed as Administrator by the Senate. In May, James Fletcher (who
came back to NASA because of Challenger, having been Administrator in
the '70s) was officially appointed as NASA Administrator by Reagan and
the Senate, and Graham went back to being Deputy Administrator.

Brian

On Mon, 7 Mar 2016 20:28:13 -0800 (PST), Stuf4
wrote:

From Jeff Findley:
In article ,
says...

Contrary to popular opinion...
The SRB design was actually adequate.

This is absolutely, completely, false.

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.

Again, this is incorrect.

There was actually ample evidence before Challenger that the field joint
was not safe. The o-rings were *never* designed to come into contact
with combustion gases, yet it had happened on *several* flights *before*
Challenger. In fact, that data is what prompted the Thiokol engineers
to recommend *not* launching Challenger on that frigid morning.

If the position that you & Greg are espousing was accurate,
then Thiokol would have *never* recommended a launch.

They were more worried about losing the lucrative SRB contract to
United Technologies (which made Titan SRMs at the time.) Going to NASA
and saying "we have to stop all launches and redesign the field joint,
oh and that's going to take 2-3 years" takes more courage than most
people have. Thiokol wouldn't do that, because they feared massive
financial penalties from not flying for 2-3 years, or possibly losing
the contract to a competitor, or even worse, see the Shuttle program
killed by Congress. NASA wouldn't do that because they'd have to tell
Congress their Shuttle couldn't fly for 2-3 years. Congress would very
likely have killed the program then and there, as Shuttle had a large
number of critics on the Hill.

And remember, the SRB design had been flawed all along, but it had
never actually failed. They'd gotten away with it every time so far,
and management had convinced itself they'd get away with it again.

They didn't.

Brian