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Lessons Learned but Forgotten from the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident
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"rk" wrote in message ... "Lessons Learned but Forgotten from the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident" Allan J. McDonald, ATK Thiokol Propulsion (Retired) Space 2004 Conference and Exhibit September 28-30, 2004, San Diego, California AIAA 2004-5830 Abstract At the time of the Challenger accident, I was the Director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for Morton Thiokol Inc.. The cause of the failure and the controversy surrounding the decision to launch the Challenger in such cold weather is discussed in detail in the Presidential Commission's Report on the Challenger Accident. The Challenger was launched at 16:38:00:010 GMT on January 28th, 1986 from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). I was in the Launch Control Center (LCC) at the time of the launch. The Mission Management Teams' (MMT) decision to launch the Challenger was flawed because of the lack of communication both horizontally and vertically within the NASA organizational structure. The Columbia accident suffered from a similar breakdown in communications along with failure to consider the seriousness of engineers' concerns much like the Challenger. This paper will discuss the details leading to the failure of the Challenger and the lessons learned from the accident. The paper will also show how the mistakes from the Challenger accident in 1986, the 25th flight of the Space Shuttle, were repeated in the loss of the Columbia in 2003, some 17 years and 88 flights later. -- rk, Just an OldEngineer "Engineers abhor extrapolation" -- Ken Iliff, from _Runway to Orbit_, 2004 |
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