- McDonald, Allan J. and James R. Hansen.
Truth, Lies, and O-Rings.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-8130-3326-6.
-
More than two decades have elapsed since Space Shuttle
Challenger met its tragic end on that cold
Florida morning in January 1986, and a shelf-full of books
have been written about the accident and its aftermath, ranging
from the five volume official
report of
the Presidential commission convened to investigate the
disaster to conspiracy theories and
accounts of religious experiences. Is
it possible, at this remove, to say anything new about
Challenger? The answer is unequivocally yes, as this
book conclusively demonstrates.
The night before Challenger was launched on its last
mission, Allan McDonald attended the final day before launch
flight readiness review at the Kennedy Space Center, representing
Morton Thiokol, manufacturer of the solid rocket motors, where he
was Director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project.
McDonald initially presented Thiokol's judgement that the launch
should be postponed because the temperatures forecast for launch
day were far below the experience base of the shuttle program and
an earlier flight at the lowest temperature to date had shown
evidence of blow-by the O-ring seals in the solid rocket field
joints. Thiokol engineers were concerned that low temperatures
would reduce the resiliency of the elastomeric rings, causing them
to fail to seal during the critical ignition transient. McDonald
was astonished when NASA personnel, in a reversal of their usual
rôle of challenging contractors to prove why their hardware
was safe to fly, demanded that Thiokol prove the solid motor was
unsafe in order to scrub the launch. Thiokol management requested
a five minute offline caucus back at the plant in Utah (in which
McDonald did not participate) which stretched to thirty minutes
and ended up with a recommendation to launch. NASA took the
unprecedented step of requiring a written approval to launch from
Thiokol, which McDonald refused to provide, but which was supplied by his
boss in Utah.
After the loss of the shuttle and its crew, and the discovery
shortly thereafter that the proximate cause was almost certainly
a leak in the aft field joint of the right solid rocket booster,
NASA and Thiokol appeared to circle the wagons, trying to deflect
responsibility from themselves and obscure the information available
to decision makers in a position to stop the launch. It was not
until McDonald's testimony to the Presidential Commission chaired
by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers that the truth began
to come out. This thrust McDonald, up to then an obscure engineering
manager, into the media spotlight and the political arena, which he
quickly discovered was not at all about his priorities as an
engineer: finding out what went wrong and fixing it so it could never
happen again.
This memoir, composed by McDonald from contemporary notes and documents
with the aid of space historian James R. Hansen (author of the
bestselling authorised
biography of Neil Armstrong) takes the reader
through the catastrophe and its aftermath, as seen by an insider who
was there at the decision to launch, on a console in the firing room
when disaster struck, before the closed and public sessions of the
Presidential commission, pursued by sensation-hungry media,
testifying before congressional committees, and consumed by the
redesign and certification effort and the push to return the shuttle
to flight. It is a personal story, but told in terms, as engineers
are wont to do, based in the facts of the hardware, the experimental
evidence, and the recollection of meetings which made the key
decisions before and after the tragedy.
Anybody whose career may eventually land them, intentionally or
not (the latter almost always the case), in the public arena can
profit from reading this book. Even if you know nothing about and
have no interest in solid rocket motors, O-rings, space exploration,
or NASA, the dynamics of a sincere, dedicated engineer who was bent
on doing the right thing encountering the ravenous media and preening
politicians is a cautionary tale for anybody who finds themselves
in a similar position. I wish I'd had the opportunity to read this
book before my own
Dark
Night of the Soul encounter with a
reporter
from the legacy media. I do not mean to equate my own mild
experience with the Hell that McDonald experienced—just to
say that his narrative would have been a bracing preparation for
what was to come.
The chapters on the Rogers Commission investigation provided, for me, a
perspective I'd not previously encountered. Many people think of
William P. Rogers
primarily as Nixon's first Secretary of State who was upstaged and
eventually replaced by Henry Kissinger. But before that Rogers was
a federal prosecutor going after organised crime in New York City
and then was Attorney General in the Eisenhower administration
from 1957 to 1961. Rogers may have aged, but his skills as an
interrogator and cross-examiner never weakened. In the sworn
testimony quoted here, NASA managers, who come across like the
kids who were the smartest in their high school class and then find
themselves on the left side of the bell curve when they show up as
freshmen at MIT, are pinned like specimen bugs to their own viewgraphs when
they try to spin Rogers and his tag team of technical takedown
artists including Richard Feynman, Neil Armstrong, and Sally Ride.
One thing which is never discussed here, but should be, is just
how totally insane it is to use large solid rockets, in any form,
in a human spaceflight program. Understand: solid rockets are best
thought of as “directed bombs”, but if detonated at an
inopportune time, or when not in launch configuration, can cause
catastrophe. A simple spark of static electricity can suffice to
ignite the propellant in a solid rocket, and once ignited there is no
way to extinguish it until it is entirely consumed. Consider: in the
Shuttle era, there are usually one or more Shuttle stacks in the
Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), and if NASA's Constellation Program
continues, this building will continue to stack solid rocket motors
in decades to come. Sooner or later, the inevitable is going to happen:
a static spark, a crane dropping a segment, or an interference fit of
two segments sending a hot fragment into the propellant below. The
consequence: destruction of the VAB, all hardware inside, and the
death of all people working therein. The expected stand-down of the
U.S. human spaceflight program after such an event is on the order of
a decade. Am I exaggerating the risks here? Well, maybe; you decide.
But within two years, three separate disasters struck the
production of large solid motors in 1985–1986.
I shall predict: if NASA continue to use large solid motors in their
human spaceflight program, there will be a decade-long gap in U.S. human
spaceflight sometime in the next twenty years.
If you're sufficiently interested in these arcane matters to have
read this far, you should read this book. Based upon notes, it's a
bit repetitive, as many of the same matters were discussed in the
various venues in which McDonald testified. But if you want to read
a single book to prepare you for being unexpectedly thrust into the
maw of ravenous media and politicians, I know of none better.
September 2009 