Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

by Adam Higginbotham

The three days of hearings devoted to what Rogers called “possible human error” came to an end on February 27, almost exactly a month after Challenger disintegrated nearly nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean. By that time, the name of Morton Thiokol had become a byword for failure, and the painstakingly nurtured public image of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been demolished. The hours of often conflicting testimony and remorseless cross-examination had dispelled any lingering notion that the accident had been caused by an inexplicable technical failure—revealing instead a pattern of mismanagement and miscommunication at the highest levels of the agency.

“You will remember that I did say at one point that we thought the decision-making process may be flawed. I believe I am speaking for the whole commission when I say that it is flawed,” Rogers told them. “Clearly flawed.”

Devlin’s men began retrieving what was left of the seven members of the Challenger crew later that same day: the astronauts aboard wanted them brought up immediately, afraid that someone might be lost. What they found was no longer recognizable as human. Two scuba divers found parts of Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, and Christa McAuliffe still strapped into their seats, tangled among the debris, but identifiable by the name tags on their flight suits; another, winched down toward the seabed on a mechanical diving stage, discovered the remains of Judy Resnik, carried by the current and caught by the cable anchoring the platform to the bottom. Jim Bagian recovered one of Ron McNair’s boots, and took it to the surface zipped inside his wetsuit. As a doctor, Bagian was able to ensure that the crew remains were handled carefully, and placed in plastic-lined bags for the journey back to shore, where military pathologists planned to conduct an autopsy.

Nevertheless, the discovery of the cabin wreckage raised further doubts about the official narrative of the accident. The nature of the debris indicated that it had not been blown apart or even severely damaged in an explosion, but remained almost entirely intact until it had hit the ocean. Now a further possibility emerged, remote but horrifying: if the crew compartment had escaped in one piece, then its occupants might also have survived the violent breakup of Challenger and—had they been equipped with any equipment to do so—could have escaped, alive, before the wreckage struck the ocean.

Yet, that afternoon, the engineers told Feynman in detail about the engines’ history of test stand failures, of the fractures in the turbine blades, and the potential for disaster in the high-pressure turbopumps. They told him that they faced at least a dozen serious problems; only half had been fixed. By the end of the day, Feynman was convinced that he had found evidence of the same syndrome in the main engine program that had led to catastrophe with the solid rockets: NASA managers who prioritized magical thinking over technical realities, while the alarm bells rung by their own engineers went unheard.

Yet it was also clear that the compartment had remained intact as it plummeted toward the surface of the Atlantic, where the investigator estimated it made impact with the water at a speed of between 130 and 180 miles per hour.

The salvage operation would continue for four more months—eventually employing sixteen aircraft, twenty-four ships, three submarines, and ten thousand personnel from the Navy, Coast Guard, NASA, and several civilian contractors. At one point costing as much as $1 million a day, by the time it concluded in August 1986 it had become the largest and most ambitious salvage operation in US Navy history.

The formal identification of the remains was complicated both by the condition in which they were found and NASA’s lack of preparation for such a devastating accident. The agency had collected no fingerprint or footprint records of the Challenger crew and—with DNA profiling still in its infancy—the pathologists resorted to dental history, X-rays of bone fragments, and anatomical comparison to arrive at their final conclusions.

Tumbling gently in free fall, it took two minutes and forty-five seconds for the broken section of Challenger to hit the Atlantic, and it now seemed possible that the seven members of the crew might have been alive the whole way down.

In meticulous detail, Rogers and his team exposed the concatenation of cost cutting, faulty design, management blunders, and institutional hubris that had led to the catastrophic end of Space Shuttle mission 51-L. In clear, simple language, the report described the development of the shuttle program and the background of Challenger’s final flight, from the crew’s training schedule to the record freeze that swept across Merritt Island on the night of January 27. It examined the most likely causes of the accident, provided a forensic description of the physical evidence hauled out of the Atlantic by the search and recovery teams, and concluded that—without doubt—the seven astronauts had been doomed by the failure of a single Viton pressure seal in the aft field joint of their spacecraft’s right-hand solid rocket booster.

But the commissioners reserved their harshest criticism for the managers of the Marshall Space Flight Center: they found that Larry Mulloy had failed for years to alert his superiors to the seriousness of the failings in the O-rings and that, in his later testimony before the commission, he had misled Rogers and his panel about the extent of the warnings he had provided. They reported that they had found not a single mention of O-ring problems in any of the paperwork—a stack of documents several inches thick—prepared during the flight readiness process of the 51-L mission.

Quoting extensively from the Thiokol engineers’ sworn testimony, the report documented the attempts of Al McDonald, Roger Boisjoly, Bob Ebeling, and Arnie Thompson to have the launch stopped, and the pressure Mulloy had applied to have their no-go recommendation reversed. The commissioners concluded that, had Mulloy passed on the seriousness of the engineers’ concerns about the seals and the effect of the cold weather to those at the top of the decision chain, the launch would have been postponed and the accident would never have happened.

Nor did those in the upper reaches of NASA management escape censure: the commission found that the agency had become increasingly blind to the hazards inherent in the shuttle program, had fatally weakened its own safety and quality assurance structures, and had insisted on conducting ambitious spur-of-the-moment experimental missions while simulaneously trying to ru...

The report concluded with a series of nine recommendations to correct the failings of the program before the shuttle returned to flight—including a redesign of the joints in the solid rockets, an overhaul of NASA management, the creation of an independent safety review board, installation of a new abort-and-escape mechanism to save astronauts in the event of an emergency, and a reduction of the flight rate within realistic goals.

In Huntsville, Bill Lucas dismissed Larry Mulloy and other senior managers at Marshall from their positions on the shuttle program, before announcing, just a few days before Rogers delivered his report, that he would also retire as Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center. In Utah, Joe Kilminster—who had signed Thiokol’s formal approval to launch Challenger—was transferred to the company’s automotive products division. His boss, Jerry Mason—who had presided over the decision to overturn the engineer’s recommendations—was forced into early retirement. Mason’s faithful yes-man, Cal Wiggins, and Bob Lund, the head of engineering who had cast the deciding vote in the fateful teleconference, were both relieved of their responsibilities and reassigned.

Together with the other men who had testified to their efforts to stop the Challenger launch—Ebeling, Brian Russell, and Arnie Thompson—when they returned to work at the plant the engineers found themselves frozen out: not just by management, but by colleagues who feared that any show of solidarity might endanger their own future at the company, or who—ironically—blamed them for job losses caused by the accident.

Presently, the outcast engineers began calling themselves the “Five Lepers.”

In the end, it would be almost three years before the shuttle flew once more.

And for more than fourteen years after Discovery’s successful return to flight, the Space Shuttle flew routinely and successfully—completing a total of eighty-seven further missions by the end of 2002.

By the time it embarked on its twenty-eighth mission on January 16, 2003, the long-serving Space Shuttle Columbia—the first to reach orbit—had been flying for more than two decades. The crew of seven was taking the venerable old lady of the shuttle fleet up on only its second voyage in three years.

Once Columbia reached orbit, mid-level engineers in Houston made three requests to repeat the kind of remote inspection performed during John Young and Bob Crippen’s test flight in 1981, using Pentagon spy satellites to capture images of the suspect area of the left wing. But two of the requests were denied by senior managers, and the third never came to the attention of the correct officials due to a breakdown in communication. There were repeated email exchanges between concerned structural engineers in the various parts of NASA’s sprawling technical bureaucracy, but their worries were also brushed aside by upper management. No pictures of the wing were taken.

What the flight controllers did not know was that, more than a week earlier, the piece of foam debris—weighing less than two pounds—had struck the orbiter with the force of a rifle bullet, smashing a hole six inches long through the brittle carbon-carbon heat shielding on the edge of the wing. In the quarter of an hour the shuttle had spent falling through the atmosphere, first nose-up and then riding the series of steep, banked turns designed to shed speed high in the atmosphere, a jet of superhot gas had surged through this gap—and, undetected by Mission Control or the crew—begun melting the aluminum framework of the left wing, and destroying mechanical and electrical components one by one.

At 9:12 a.m., Flight Director LeRoy Cain turned from his console to the back of the room, where he received word of a Dallas TV station broadcasting live images of multiple contrails high overhead, on Columbia’s flightpath. Thousands of pieces of debris were already hitting the ground, falling into ponds and backyards, on highways and car windshields, in a track of terrible rain ten miles wide and three hundred miles long, stretching from East Texas into Louisiana.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board delivered its report on August 26, 2003, and concluded that many of the lessons of the Challenger disaster had gone unheeded. The agency once again acknowledged its faults, and vowed more technological and management changes.

By then, Richard Feynman, too, was dead, but his blunt conclusion in Appendix F had became famous. His words had proved prophetic, and provided an epitaph not only for NASA’s heroic goals with the National Space Transportation System, but for many of the historic catastrophes caused by mankind’s overconfidence in his own ingenuity.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, Feynman wrote, for nature cannot be fooled.