Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

We tell our kids in this society not to lie. We encourage them to believe that if they tell the truth they'll be supported. We owe them the example of practicing what we preach. The most important thing at issue in this case is no longer how well the space program has been managed or even whether Challenger should have gone up that day. It is the m

problems, Al. You really shouldn't concern yourself with them.” To which I replied, “You know all three of these together should be more than sufficient to cancel the launch, if the matter of the O-rings that we discussed earlier isn't.” The NASA people could tell I was disturbed and tried half-heartedly to reassure me, “We will pass these on as co

we as a committee try to go about designing better public policy, we need some harder answers than that. We've got to avoid the kind of bad discretion and bad judgment that Thiokol used in

It was the first time in my two-year career in the Shuttle program that we were experiencing a last-minute crisis of this magnitude just before a launch.

I wasn't recommending not launching because of what I knew, but because of what I didn't know, and I thought that NASA was in the same position. It just wasn't worth taking the risk with all of these unknowns.

It took a while for the fax to arrive, so all the parties in the meeting room stayed around the conference table. I told them I didn't feel very good about this launch recommendation. In fact, I soon made the direct statement, “If anything happens to this launch, I wouldn't want to be the person that has to stand in front of a Board of Inquiry to e

Degree candidates, parents, relatives and friends, distinguished guests, members of the faculty: it is my privilege and pleasure to present the charge to the graduating class of 1986…. As you leave this University, your life will be a cycle of bull markets and bear markets. You will find that there is a lot more bull out there than there is bear. M

Some say “ignorance is bliss,” but in this case it contributed to a national disaster.

Larry Mulloy then asked Joe Kilminster, Vice President of Space Booster Programs at MTI, what the program office recommendation was, and Kilminster said that he would not recommend launch based upon the engineering position that was just presented. Mulloy then challenged the engineering position based upon his own assessment that the engineering da