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

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1986 by Richard Cook

Pressure points

The biggest gap in the commission's report, however, is not its failure to explore whether there was a cover-up, but its failure to explain why there was so much pressure to launch that day. As former administrator James Beggs said, "the launch decision was made in the face of quite a lot of adverse conditions.' In addition to Thiokol's concerns about the O-rings, other contractor engineers had objected that ice on the launch pad was at hazardous levels and that high seas jeopardized recovery of the re-usable solid rocket boosters.

But, as it well known by now, this was not a typical shuttle launch. For the first time in the history of the shuttle, Thiokol had to prove why NASA should not launch, rather than why it should. Thiokol engineer Allan McDonald, one of several witnesses who noted the difference in tone and behavior of NASA officials, recalled, "I've been in many Flight Readiness Reviews, and I've had a very critical audience . . . justifying why our hardware was ready to fly . . .. I was surprised that the tone of the [pre-launch] meeting was just the opposite of that. I didn't have to prove I was ready to fly. . . . In this case, we had to prove it wasn't ready, and that's a big difference.'

NASA was usually extremely cautious about making decisions without examining previous experiences with similar actions. Yet on January 27, NASA hammered Thiokol for suggesting that NASA stay within past experience for O-ring temperatures. They had never before launched with temperatures below 53 degrees. The O-ring temperature on January 28 was 28 degrees. Before lift-off, Thiokol vice president Joseph Kilminster signed the approval document claiming that a sufficient back-up system existed for the O-rings, even though having previously declared the O-rings "criticality 1' meant there was no reliable back-up. Kilminster signed even though all the Thiokol engineers recommended against the launch. As Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly said to the commission on February 14, "There was never one positive, pro-launch statement ever made by anybody.'

Why was the pressure so intense?

At this point it is necessary to look at whether there was pressure arising from the public relations opportunity surrounding Christa McAuliffe and the Teacher-in-Space program. There has been widely reported speculation that a White House official, allegedly Chief of Staff Donald Regan, gave orders for Challenger to lift off, saying, "Tell them to get that thing up!' That report was angrily denied by Press Secretary Larry Speakes and has never been proven.

But even without a direct order, the timing of the State of the Union address created pressure, either from the White House or within NASA, to launch quickly. NASA has always been public relations conscious, and the Teacher- and Journalist-in-Space programs provided the most recent opportunities to rally public support around the programs. At the same time, NASA was becoming increasingly sensitive to media criticism of past launch cancellations and the suggestion that NASA could no longer perform well. In an interview with The Washington Post after the launch, Kennedy Space Center Director Richard Smith indicated that pressure from the news media had a powerful influence on the atmosphere in which its launch decisions were made.