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When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”
The two managers began shouting at each other until, at last, the NASA official ended the argument. “You are the contractor,” he said. “You do as you’re told. Period.”
By then the capsule had been rebuilt and stripped of flammable material, with a one-piece hatch that could be opened in three seconds, new wiring, armored plumbing, and modifications to accommodate a mixed-gas atmosphere; the astronauts would now wear fireproof pressure suits woven from glass fiber and coated in Teflon.
But some of the most profound changes were in the spirit and attitude of the engineers who would go on to take Apollo to the moon. Shaken out of the complacency and arrogance that had set in during the successes of the Mercury and Gemini missions, the technicians embraced a new earnestness, and a shared focus on the hard work necessary to take men to the lunar surface before the end of the decade. But for the young engineers at NASA, the idea of the program as a stirring adventure, and the early exhilaration of constantly improvising solutions to previously unimagined technical challenges, was
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The theoretical recognition that things could possibly go wrong was supplanted by the cold realization that they would
Just as they had when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the lunar surface some three years earlier, US TV networks carried live pictures of the Apollo 17 mission. This time, however, viewers called the CBS switchboard in frustration: the coverage had made them miss the latest developments in the hot hospital drama, Medical Center.
counterintuitively—the most effective design for ballistic missile warheads was a blunt, curved shape. This would fall more slowly as it reentered the atmosphere, and generate a shock wave that would insulate the warhead itself from the destructive energy of friction, enabling it to remain intact until it reached its target.
This delta-wing shuttle had the range that the Air Force wanted, but was so much heavier than Faget’s original concept that it necessitated saving weight elsewhere:
Now the orbiter would have to glide down to its landing strip, plummeting to Earth at the speed and angles of a fighter jet, but approaching the runway with total precision to execute a perfect landing at the first attempt.
Their inspection revealed that the laminated lining of one of the two rockets’ nozzles, designed to be eroded slowly away during flight to protect it from the plume of superhot gases escaping from the end of the booster, had been eaten almost completely through by flaming exhaust. They calculated that if the rocket had burned for just eight or nine seconds longer, the spacecraft would have been destroyed, killing all five astronauts on board: the most catastrophic accident in NASA history.
But many NASA veterans believed it was a result of Administrator James Beggs’s superstition about the number thirteen, a fear that had become widely ingrained at the agency after the near catastrophe of Apollo 13—infamously launched at 13.13 Houston time and crippled by an explosion on April 13. So Beggs issued instructions for an entirely new numbering system. “I don’t care what you do,” he said, “but we’re not going to fly an STS-13.”
Tandems were not for everyone, and could be a litmus test of a marriage; Marcia and Greg knew several couples who invested in the two-seat bikes, but later sold them, rather than continue riding and get divorced.
NASA estimated that, collectively, the crews at the Cape had to put in the equivalent of three years of work on the ground for every minute each orbiter spent in space.
In the same week the competing teachers gathered in Washington, DC, the agency successfully returned the one-hundredth American astronaut from space, aboard Discovery: a mission chiefly notable for carrying a member of the Saudi royal family into orbit.
But few beyond the perimeter of the Johnson Space Center understood how close the shuttle had come to calamity—still less how it had been saved by the split-second decision-making of one person.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
He told Maready that the weather at the Cape had been perfect for a launch all morning; he remained as frustrated as he had been when he awoke. “You know, Bill,” he said, “you’ve got people down here making decisions who’ve never even flown an airplane before.”
In the past, if a contractor’s data about the state of flight hardware had been inconclusive, the default position was not to fly: they were expected to prove that their equipment and components constituted an acceptable risk before launch. Now, it seemed, Mulloy was asking them to prove the opposite—to show him the data that proved conclusively it was not safe to launch.
Never in the history of the program had a contractor been asked to provide written confirmation of the decision—and now, suspecting the agency managers were preparing to cover themselves in case something went wrong, McDonald refused to cooperate. “I won’t sign that recommendation, Larry,” he said. “It will have to come from the plant in Utah.”
But at the bottom of the right-hand booster, near the aft field joint, the reading was just 8 degrees—an astonishing 24 degrees below freezing; that just couldn’t be right. Stevenson and his engineers assumed the thermometer was malfunctioning, and took note of the numbers, but kept the data to themselves.
“The impression is that you were directed to do it, that there was so much pressure to get this launch off the ground that you were directed to do it, and you did it,”
Meanwhile, a team of four astronauts was sent from Houston to comb the beaches for body parts.
An organization that had, since its inception, boasted of its ability to manage extraordinary risk on the frontiers of technology and learn from its mistakes had instead overlooked a litany of clear warnings; the signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture bred by repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible.
Richard Feynman had threatened to withhold his signature from the document over the concluding statement, which he regarded as a Pollyanna sop to an institution that had grown complacent and, perhaps, incompetent—and lost touch with the rigorous engineering principles on which it had been founded.
It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product to the point of fantasy,” he wrote. He suggested that agency officials had, from the very beginning, oversold the shuttle in order to maintain their access to federal coffers; and he compared the Marshall engineers’ insistence on flying after the discovery of O-ring damage to Russian roulette: “If you hold a gun to your head and shoot and don’t kill yourself,” he said, “a man would be foolish to say, Let’s spin it and fire again.”
On learning of the agreement, Ronald Krist described the settlement as “woefully inadequate.” At $4,641,000, the rocket company’s share of the compensation was little more than a rounding error for the corporate accountants: since signing the deal to manufacture the boosters in November 1973, the NASA contract had earned Thiokol revenues of some $1.5 billion.
