
Letters Helped Challenger Shuttle Engineer Shed 30 Years of Guilt - curtis
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/25/466555217/your-letters-helped-challenger-shuttle-engineer-shed-30-years-of-guilt
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zhte415
What I concluded from the short but quite touching article:

Speak out if you see something wrong, no matter what the profession.

Speak out with a passion.

Because not doing so will end in traumatizing guilt, which Mr. Ebeling was
fighting with for so long, despite doing so.

The fantastic quote by Charlie Bolden:

"We honor [the Challenger astronauts] not through bearing the burden of their
loss, but by constantly reminding each other to remain vigilant," the
statement read. "And to listen to those like Mr. Ebeling who have the courage
to speak up so that our astronauts can safely carry out their missions."

~~~
jacalata
That's a weird lesson to learn from a story about a guy who spoke out and
still carried that guilt. It seems more like a lesson of "win the argument or
you will be traumatized"?

~~~
tekklloneer
There's a lot of variations on "it's better to have loved", and this is one of
them. You're more likely to regret not doing something than doing it with good
intent and sound reason.

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zrail
This is a beautiful outcome. I remember reading the original story and
thinking that it was incredibly sad that he's holding that guilt, after doing
all that he could do to prevent the disaster he saw coming.

The statement from Bolden is particularly meaningful. Nobody can speak for the
people who died on the flight, but as a contemporary colleague he can reflect
on what they may have thought, as astronauts and test pilots.

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lotharbot
I'm glad to see Bob finally able to find peace. Just the step of coming
forward and talking about Challenger was huge; the outpouring of love and
kindness from all corners of the globe is incredible.

(I've known him for about ten years -- he attends a small church in Brigham
City where my father-in-law is the pastor. From what I understand, even most
of his closest friends had no idea.)

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fapjacks
The radio interview was crushingly sad, listening in the car to that old guy
blame himself. It was one of the saddest things I have heard in a while.

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zw123456
The story behind the space shuttle is very interesting. Some of the early
designs were really cool [http://io9.gizmodo.com/early-design-specs-show-the-
space-shu...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/early-design-specs-show-the-space-
shuttle-could-have-be-1528524224) The real issue in my view, is not Bob's
fault (obviously) but politics.

Although this is maybe bit off topic, From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process)
"While NASA would likely have chosen liquid boosters had it complete control
over the design, the Office of Management and Budget insisted on less
expensive solid boosters due to their lower projected development costs"

The real issue was that it had to be built large enough to carry military
payloads or else congress would not fund it. That really forced a lot of
terrible design compromises.

I would tell Bob to not feel guilty, the ones that need to feel guilty are the
politicians and OMB people who boxed the engineers into a corner.

It will be interesting to see if the private sector who is taking a lot of
this development over will be safer.

Just my 2 cents.

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brotherjerky
Related: If you haven't read Edward Tufte's take down of the PowerPoint slides
from the Challenger test data, I highly recommend checking it out:
[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB)

~~~
epc
Tufte's analysis covers the Columbia disaster in 2003.

~~~
andykellr
A quick Google search turned up this excerpt of his analysis of the Challenger
disaster (beginning on page 14).

[https://blogs.stockton.edu/hist4690/files/2012/06/Edward-
Tuf...](https://blogs.stockton.edu/hist4690/files/2012/06/Edward-Tufte-Visual-
and-Statistical-Thinking.pdf)

~~~
brotherjerky
Yes, this is what I meant to reference. Thanks.

~~~
epc
Ah, ok, Tufte also released an analysis of the PowerPoint decks analyzing the
Columbia tile problems.

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint)

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nullc
This is relevant and well worth the time:
[http://www.viruscomix.com/page588.html](http://www.viruscomix.com/page588.html)

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DrBazza
Great article.

Doesn't Musk/Space-X now review any launch if _anyone_ has a concern? What
does NASA now do?

~~~
dave2000
NASA doesn't launch anything because there's a concern that it'll steal
resources from exciting new ways of killing people.

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throwaway_exer
Excuse me, but as a Sr. Engineer, the Thiokol engineers should go to the grave
feeling guilty.

Those graphs are an embarrassment ... they certainly collected far more data
than depicted there.

And there should have been pre-launch documentation of what the acceptable
minimum operating temperature. Do you really think that any of the shuttle
parts were mfg. without temp and vibration data?

~~~
byoung2
_Excuse me, but as a Sr. Engineer, the Thiokol engineers should go to the
grave feeling guilty._

I think you're right they should feel guilty, not because they didn't argue
hard enough to stop the launch, but for knowingly allowing a flawed SRB design
to stay in service for so long. It was a well-known fact that the o-ring
design was flawed, even before the first shuttle launched. In several
launches, the joints in the SRB flared out, causing leaks, but luckily the
o-ring slipped out of its groove and sealed the joint. This was not part of
the design, but they change the spec to account for this unintended effect.

This is why they should feel guilty. Instead of fixing the flaw, they counted
on a Rube Goldberg-like sequence of events to fix it.

~~~
hga
Indeed, o-rings are supposed to seal on compression, not expansion, and when
it turned out in the field that these joins flexed enough to require sealing
under the latter they should have been revised.

But, hey, the shuttles didn't blow up prior to Challenger, and certainly
nothing short of a catastrophe would have motivated NASA to pay for such an
expensive undertaking, there was no "allow a flawed SRB design to stay in
service", that wasn't their decision, as show in the meetings before the
fateful launch. As it was, the SRBs were hacks designed to decrease
development costs vs. safety or cost in operation.

~~~
byoung2
You're right it was a budget decision made by NASA, but the engineers should
have stressed the point long before Jan 28, 1986.

I think the term for that is normalization of variance. If my buddy has driven
drunk many times and not killed anyone, then he can drive drunk tonight and
not kill anyone. Except tonight he drives drunk and kill 7 people. The sin
here is in letting someone amass a history of drunk driving incidents.

The issue I think wasn't raised was that all the successful launches before
Challenger were outliers...the engineers knew it and instead of raising the
issue early and saying the o ring implementation was effectively duct tape,
they changed the spec to allow for extrusion and slipping of the o ring.

In fact, on the day of Challenger's fateful launch, Thiokol engineers were
relieved, and even congratulated each other that the shuttle even made it off
the launchpad. Despite the expansion in the joint, and o ring failure,
aluminum oxides filled the joint, sealing it. If not for abnormally strong
wind shear, this seal might have held, and the disaster might not have
happened. In this alternate timeline, would Thiokol and NASA have ever
addressed the issue?

~~~
zb
> the engineers should have stressed the point long before Jan 28, 1986.

They did. They argued that the booster was unsafe at any temperature, but were
overruled when NASA demanded proof that it was _un_ safe - a clear inversion
of the correct burden of proof. It was the breakdown in the safety culture at
NASA that led to this inversion, and not anything that anyone at Thiokol did
or didn't do, that was the root cause of the accident. That made _some_ sort
of catastrophic failure almost inevitable.

Having lost this battle, the engineers were left the night before the launch
to argue on much narrower grounds, and with an extreme paucity of data, that
the launch was unsafe at the prevailing temperature even if it wasn't at a
more usual temperature. (Even today it's not clear to me how big this effect
was - remember that the expansion rate of the O-ring was insufficient to deal
with the opening rate of the joint at _any_ temperature.) Once again they were
overruled, and the rest is history.

It's possible to argue that the engineers should have brought all the data
they had to bear and attempted to relitigate the safety of the entire booster
design the night before the launch. (I think Tufte's case in _Visual
Explanations_ basically boils down to this.) But it's not at all clear that
this would have been successful, or even permitted.

You're correct that _Challenger_ would likely have escaped but for the
windshear. I'm almost certain, however, that recovery of a booster with the
_entire_ O-ring burned through for the first time would have have prompted
some kind of action. Whether that would have lead to a complete redesign or
just launch temperature restrictions that would have only delayed rather than
prevented a catastrophic failure, we'll never know.

