On January 27, 1986, the night before the space shuttle Challenger was set to take flight, in the privacy of his home, NASA engineer Bob Ebeling told his wife that the Challenger was going to explode in the morning, and everyone on board would certainly die.
The next day, on January 28, from the floor of my first-grade classroom, I watched Ebeling’s private prediction become a public nightmare, as the Challenger was torn apart over the Atlantic Ocean, only seventy-three seconds after takeoff.
That's when the term “O-rings” entered the national lexicon, the infamous rubber insulation gaskets that malfunctioned, breaking the seal of the rocket boosters.
What people don’t know is that technically, the O-rings didn’t malfunction; they worked exactly as intended. The engineers who created them knew they posed a danger in colder temperatures, and when the weather forecast made it clear that on January 28 the temperatures would be in the low twenties, they rang a loud and clear alarm. Calling a meeting the day before launch, they warned management that the O-rings might fail in temperatures below sixty degrees and urged for a delay.
With these facts in mind, it’s hard to say the O-rings are to blame for the Challenger explosion. Imagine a car that’s designed to operate safely at speeds below 120 miles per hour. If a driver knowingly violates the safety standards, taking the car for a joyride at 180 miles per hour, spins out, and crashes into a tree, do we blame the accident on the car, or on the careless, negligent driver?
In addition to O-rings, the Rogers Commission reported another, perhaps more significant, source of blame for the tragedy. The same thing investigators would also blame seventeen years later, when the spaceship Columbia disintegrated upon its return through the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts. In both cases, the stage for disaster was set, not by technical failure but by NASA’s organizational culture.
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NASA is an organization of our best and brightest scientists and engineers. How is it possible they were foiled by something like culture, twice, when human lives were at stake?
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When power is too concentrated, among an individual or a group, truth is almost always the first casualty. People instinctively understand they must go along with reality as legislated by those in power, and that dissent in any form, whether warranted or not, is threatening. NASA, like most corporations today, had no way of neutralizing power, of separating agenda from truth. This might seem like a dramatic parallel to make, but it’s no less accurate. Consequences aren’t usually as disastrous or as public as a space shuttle explosion, but they’re no less real, and they leave a dramatic impact rippling in their wake.
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