Lost in Space; Were both space-shuttle disasters the result of putting environmentalism ahead of the lives of the astronauts?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 2003

The nation was stunned by the explosion of the Challenger minutes after liftoff for a mission that eagerly had been anticipated by the public because one of its crew members was Christa McAuliffe, the first schoolteacher in space. When she and her six fellow astronauts were killed immediately the cause was established as hot gases burning through an allegedly faulty O-ring joint in one of the solid rocket boosters. NASA was criticized for launching in cold weather, and some in the media found a way to blame President Ronald Reagan by speculating that the administration wanted the shuttle to be in orbit during the State of the Union address. (The respected and independent Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger explosion found no evidence of political pressure for the launch.)

At a Washington hearing a few months after the disaster, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman put some of the O-ring material in a glass of ice water and then demonstrated that it no longer was flexible. But largely overlooked was the fact that NASA had just switched to a new type of putty to protect the O-rings from hot gases.

Why had NASA risked using a new type of putty when the old stuff had worked successfully on nine previous missions? Because the previous putty contained tiny amounts of politically incorrect asbestos, and its producer, the Fuller O'Brien Co. of San Francisco, stopped making the product for fear of lawsuits after asbestos was made the subject of media scare stories and alarmist claims by environmental groups. Malcolm Ross, who had studied asbestos as a research scientist for 41 years at the U.S. Geological Survey, notes that the U.S. Air Force also suddenly had two launch failures with its Titan 34-D rockets after substituting for the asbestos-based putty. This followed a string of 50 successful launches with the old putty.

"Fuller O'Brien made this product going back long before World War II," says Ross, now a scientific adviser to the free-market Consumer Alert organization. He tells Insight, "It was putty used in the aircraft industry for all sorts of purposes." Like Feynman, Ross did his own experiment by putting the old and new putties in his freezer to simulate the cold temperatures of the fatal shuttle launch. "The [asbestos] putty was still quite puttylike, quite pliable," Ross recalls. "The substitute putty got very hard and wasn't sticky. You can imagine that under cool temperature the Fuller O'Brien product was much superior."

The space shuttle isn't the only instance where the replacement of asbestos with more eco-friendly materials may have resulted in tragic loss of life. As veteran journalist Ralph de Toledano detailed in Insight, the decision not to use the heat-retardant asbestos to protect steel supports on the highest floors of the World Trade Center when they were built in the 1970s meant that they collapsed faster than they otherwise would have, leaving less time for people to escape during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 [see the last word, Dec. 3, 2001].