Lessons Learned but Forgotten from the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

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"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