Today is the 20th anniversary of the day that the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch.
January 28, 1986 was the first "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" moment of my life. There have been two since, of course: the Oklahoma bombing, and the terrorist attacks of September 11th. But I remember exactly were I was: in a car in Oakland, CA, with my dad, listening to the radio.
This story on MSNBC tells a piece of the story, and fairly accurately from what I can tell. What it fails to capture is the other side: the politics of the Reagan admnistration, the first true mass-media presidency. Because the Challenger incident was not just a failure of technology, or of NASA; it was a demonstration for the country and the world of what happens when politics trumps reason.
Prior to that fateful day, Challenger had sat on the launch pad for over a month, as it suffered from one technical problem after another; for those of us who were fans of space exploration, it was disheartening to watch as NASA would fix one problem just to see something else, completely unrelated, spring up to further delay the launch. This was compounded by the fact that shuttle launches had started to become routine; launch and landing coverage had become shorter and shorter, and some networks had simply stopped covering them altogether, opting instead simply to show highlights on the morning and evneing news. CBS radio cut to the launch during the final 30 seconds of countdown, and cut away 30 seconds after liftoff, only to have to come back one minute later and announce that something horrible had occurred. The whole shuttle program was becoming a bit tiresome, and the novelty had clearly worn off. People thought of it more like taking a 747 flight to Europe than sitting on top of several thousand tons of explosives and lighting it up like a firecracker. In fact, literally just before KCBS radio cut to live coverage of the launch that morning, we were treated to a commentary from Charles Osgood that was essentally a 3-minute whine-fest asking "when will this bird go up?"
But there's more. You see, later that week, President Reagan was scheduled to give his State of the Union address. And the White House desperately wanted to talk about the shuttle, and particularly McAuliffe, in space. For these were not happy times; the Cold War arms buildup was in full swing, tensions (and the deficit) were running high, and the gap between the rich and the poor was widening.
Further, the Reagan administration was no friend of public education. In fact, Reagan tried hard to axe the Department of Education altogether; when he found that he couldn't do that, he chose instead to appoint a series of Secretaries of Education who would systematically decimate the department; either quietly (Bell) or while providing loud distractions (Bennett). Putting Christa McAuliffe on the shuttle was a PR stunt, pure and simple, but a very effective "weapon of mass distraction" from what Reagan was really doing to wreak havoc on public education in this country.
(if this is all sounding too familiar, keep in mind the number of people in George W. Bush's cabinet who got their big break working for Reagan)
While it was never publicly admitted (the Reagan administration could close ranks as well as W's) it was clear that there was significant political pressure being placed upon NASA to launch the shuttle asap -- it would be an embarrassment to the White House if it was still sitting on the launch pad when Reagan was delivering his State of the Union address.
The final report of the presidential commission investigating the accident makes for very interesting reading. It called out, as is true in almost all catastrophic engineering failures, that it wasn't a single cause -- there were were multiple, cascading failures that all contributed. The physical cause was that the rubber O-rings in the joints of the solid rocket boosters lost their elasticity at low temperatures, allowing the rocket blast to escape out through the joint and ignite the auxiliary fuel tank. This was a known danger, carefully studied and tracked by the Morton Thiokol engineers who designed and manufactured the SRB's, but the MT engineers were unable to effectively present their concerns to the NASA managers, and the NASA managers were under such extreme pressure to launch that they weren't listening anyway.
There was an absolutely devastating moment during the hearings, when the NASA managers were trying to obfuscate their failures by painting the information as overly complex and difficult to interpret. Noted physicist Richard Feynman, a commission member, took a piece of O-ring material, stuck it in his glass of ice-water, and showed that it became inflexible and held indentations. In that one moment the NASA managers lost all credibility. Here's a longer writeup of Feynman's observations on the shuttle, in his own words.
The one good thing you can say about NASA is that they don't shy away from their history. On their web site you can find all the details of the Challegner investigation, as well as the Columbia investigation and even the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire investigation. There are good people there who embrace science and learning from the whole set of data available to us.
Edward Tufte does the best explanation of the MT engineers' failure to communicate, in his book Visual Explanations. As an aside, if you've never read Tufte's books, go get them right away -- they are a visual and intellectual feast.
As to the political forces at play: I keep hoping that one day, when the neocons are all long retired and in their autumn years, some of them will decide to finally come clean about all the crap that went on behind the scenes. Of course, I'm not holding my breath -- there are still too many fans of Saint Ronald out there who would move quickly to "swift boat" anyone who broke ranks.
We're twenty years on from a major tragedy in American history. I honor the memories of the Challenger crew, and salute the honor that they brought on us all by risking their lives to push forward the boundaries of human exploration and knowledge. I hope we never lose the courage or desire to push forward boundaries. But I fear that we have not learned our lessons well, and that -- as Columbia showed -- we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.
11:09:07 AM 
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