The Rogers Commission failed; questions it never asked, answers it didn't listen to - Challenger accident

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1986 by Richard Cook

Another commission member, Maj. General Donald Kutyna, said to Michael Weeks, Moore's deputy, "My problem is The New York Times kind of problem. Here it says that Cook says it's going to be catastrophic, and here is another guy who says loss of mission, vehicle, and crew [the formal description of what would happen in the event of O-ring failure]. Somehow we've got to be able to explain in the open session tomorrow why this is different from what you said [that the O-ring problems didn't constitute a serious "safety of flight' issue].'

At another hearing, after being told that Rockwell engineers had opposed the launch, Rogers said, "If Rock well comes up in a public session and says, "We advised NASA not to launch and they went ahead anyway,' then we have a problem.'

Rogers had another problem of his own: The New York Times seemed to know more than his commission did about the history of the O-rings. Using language more apologetic than prosecutorial, Rogers gently encouraged NASA officials to be more forthcoming. "This is not an adversarial procedure. This commission is not in any way adversarial, and we hope that in the future, as much as it is humanly possible, when you think information has been developed that we should know about, that you will volunteer to give us that information.'

Holding their breath

As testimony and press reports increasingly pointed to NASA's early knowledge of the O-ring problems, the commission became less and less protective. On February 11, Commissioner Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology demonstrated the problems with the O-ring by dipping one in ice water and showing it did not retain its resiliency. That dramatic act showed just how serious the O-ring problem was and how obvious it must have been to NASA officials. John Young and other astronauts also began to question NASA's management, attitudes, and actions. On Saturday, February 15, Rogers declared that the launch decision "may have been flawed' and ordered that an internal investigative body set up by NASA be reconstituted so as not to include anyone involved in the launch process.

After months of accumulating evidence--some of it uncovered by the commission--that showed that virtually the entire NASA bureaucracy knew about the O-ring problems, the final report insisted that the top-level officials who launched Challenger "were unaware of the recent history of problems concerning the O-rings and the joint.'

The evidence to the contrary is now abundant. To start, there were the statements of Aldrich and Lovingood in the early hearings, the Times article, and my memo. During the February 11 open hearing, which the report does not even mention, Lawrence Mulloy told the commission that the April 1985 launch had caused erosion in the secondary O-ring, meaning the primary O-ring had failed completely. In addition, O-ring charring was a major agenda item on all Jesse Moore's monthly staff reviews during 1985, according to documents released by NASA. While at NASA headquarters, I worked almost daily with headquarters engineers who worked for Moore and had been deeply involved in review of the O-ring problems during 1984 and 1985. It was one of these engineers who told me in mid-1985 that they "held their breath' with each shuttle launch because of the O-rings, a statement I passed on to the press and the commission. The report also doesn't mention that I told them on March 28 that a top solid rocket engineer had been advised not to list O-ring charring on headquarters meetings as it was considered too sensitive an issue to put in writing. To assume that Moore never knew of the seriousness of O-ring problems means assuming, among other things, that he was oblivious to the activities and concerns of his own engineers.