My book Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How
the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space
Age is being published this month (February 2007) by Thunder’s
Mouth Press. It’s the only book by a participant in both
the events leading up to the Challenger disaster of 1986 and the
investigations which followed it.
I went to work at NASA in July 1985, six months before Challenger
blew up 73 seconds after liftoff in the freezing morning temperatures
in Florida on January 28, 1986. I had been hired as a resource
analyst in the comptroller’s office at headquarters.
My first assignment was to interview the solid rocket booster
engineers at headquarters who were looking at problems with the
O-ring joints which connected the segments of the rockets. I was
shocked when they told me that the flaws in the joints could cause
the shuttle to blow up. They said they "held their breath"
with every launch. Though a redesign was in the works, the shuttle
would "fly as is" for over two more years. I reported
this in a memo to management.
There were other problems with the shuttle that caused people
at headquarters to say that "sooner or later" there
would be a catastrophe which would bring the program to a halt.
But no one could stop it. The Space Transportation System had
been declared operational by President Reagan after the fourth
shuttle flight in 1982.
Besides, the shuttle was becoming a platform for space weapons
testing under the Strategic Defense Initiative – "Star
Wars" – so it was an integral part of the Reagan military
build-up. Whether the military use of the shuttle was in agreement
with the stated purpose of NASA’s 1958 enabling legislation
– "that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful
purposes for the benefit of mankind" – was a question
no one seemed to be asking.
The greatest tragedy of the space age took place that cold January
morning. Seven astronauts died, including Christa McAuliffe, the
teacher-in-space. They were calling her mission "the ultimate
field trip."
NASA knew that same afternoon exactly what had happened to cause
the disaster. The O-rings had been too cold to seal. A burnthrough
in the side of one of the two booster rockets severed the strut
which connected it to the external tank. The hydrogen from the
tank ignited in a gigantic fireball, and the Challenger orbiter
broke into pieces, with the crew cabin emerging intact. The cabin
fell 40,000 feet and struck the ocean at 200 miles per hour. At
least some of the astronauts were alive on the way down. We know
this, because three of their emergency air packs had been activated.
NASA immediately moved to implement a cover-up, but more was
going on than met the eye. A few days later a Presidential Commission
was created by the White House which had its own cover-up agenda,
namely to conceal White House involvement in the launch decision
in connection with publicity for the teacher-in-space mission.
So I was sitting with my wife Phyllis in our house in rural Virginia
with a pile of documents showing just how thoroughly NASA was
aware of the O-ring problems and how they knew such a disaster
could happen. I approached the Presidential Commission but sensed
something was strange with their approach so quickly backed off.
I tried to document internally that engineers were saying it was
a preventable accident, but NASA confiscated all the copies of
my report – except the one I took home, of course.
I made the decision to leak the O-ring papers, including my own
July 23, 1985, warning memo, to the New York Times. The story
that resulted, written by science writer Phillip Boffey, won the
Pulitzer Prize.
Suffice it to say that almost everything the public learned about
Challenger, notably the facts that the O-ring seals were known
to be deficient and that the night before the launch, engineers
from Morton Thiokol had argued vociferously against launching
in the cold weather, originated with whistleblowers who defied
their organizations to speak out. These included myself at NASA
headquarters, Roger Boisjoly and Alan McDonald of Morton Thiokol,
a member of the Presidential Commission, Nobel Prize winner Dr.
Richard Feynman, and John Young, NASA’s most veteran astronaut.
From one point of view, my book is the largely untold story of
the whistleblowers.
But there were many things the official reports did not disclose.
While the militarization of the manned space program was the chief
underlying cause of the disaster, not one word in the reports
of the Commission or the House Science and Technology Committee
mentioned this fact. The reports claimed that higher NASA officials
were uninformed about the O-ring problems, which was untrue. The
reports blamed poor communications and procedures, also untrue.
NASA was the world leader in communications and procedures. Nothing
was said about the fact that NASA was in the throes of a leadership
crisis due to a virtual coup engineered by the political right-wing
a few weeks before the explosion. Finally, the Commission claimed
there was no political pressure from outside NASA to launch Challenger,
which my book shows conclusively to be false.
In fact, Chairman William Rogers admitted to the Senate that
the Commission didn’t know why NASA launched when it shouldn’t
have. This was repeated in the report of the House Science and
Technology Committee. Think of it – two major government
investigations, months of hearings and investigations, thousands
of pages of records and reports, and they said they didn’t
know why it happened.
My book analyzes all these issues through meeting notes, documents,
interviews, and analysis, much of which has never before been
disclosed in print. And my book, twenty-one years later, does
tell you why and how it happened.
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