12 thoughts on “The Challenger Disaster”

  1. It’s truly astounding how close to disaster the entire Shuttle program skirted, with almost no public awareness of the fact. We almost lost STS-8 to SRB burn through, we almost lost STS-9 to APU fires, we almost lost STS-27 to tile damage from debris strikes during ascent. And yet when we lost STS-51L it came as a surprise, when we lost STS-107 it came as even more of a surprise. There’s always been a huge disconnect in NASA manned spaceflight when it comes to risk management. Issues are swept under the carpet so forcefully that it becomes difficult to actually grapple with them until someone dies.

    I haven’t read your book yet but I think this is an important aspect in NASA’s risk aversion. When you run a program basically inside of a constructed fantasy where important risks do not get the attention they deserve then managing risk becomes like gambling, so it’s necessary to reduce any risk that is easily understood and controllable to a minimum. You see the same thing in unmanned spaceflight though expressed differently. It’s impossible to do anything in space without significant risk, even launching a boring comsat. And when risk aversion plus mismanagement plus risk delusion come to the table it’s like squeezing a water balloon, the risk doesn’t go away it just goes elsewhere. And if you have some place where risk has a tendency to go ignored, guess where the it will tend to build up?

    1. John Young says that if he’d known what was happening to the body flap during the launch of STS-1, he and Robert Crippen would have ejected.

  2. In the twelfth image down the Challenger is being attacked by a giant seagull. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the image wasn’t released till now.

  3. Boy, those brought back bad memories. Horrible, awful day. We were surprised to lose her, and Columbia later on. But the amazing thing really is that the system worked so well, so many times.

    As we start thinking again about reusable spacecraft and launchers, I hope the folks in charge keep in mind that we need more than a handful, because eventually we will lose them.

    1. And we need to start planning for their successor when we make them operational. We not only made the mistake of thinking those few orbiters were all we would need, but also compounded it by acting like the Space Shuttle was the last word in spaceflight, until we ensured that when we did have to retire obsolete technology, we’d have a gap before the new one came out.

    2. At this point most all of us can explain why those mistakes occurred and why they were unavoidable given the pressures on the program. The Shuttle was so expensive to operate that almost any smaller craft would be cheaper, even if it didn’t re-use any components. The existence of any alternative would’ve given Congress a reason to kill of the Shuttle or greatly reduce its flight rate, increasing the per flight costs, leading to a death spiral that would kill it entirely, and with it all the touch labor that depended on it. Due to political realities it was a program that couldn’t be killed and had to die from accidental death.

      1. No argument from me. The great expense of the STS also meant that no serious money was available for a replacement- X-38, anybody? It was obvious in 2003 that we needed something else, stat, and we sure got it- Soyuz! Commercial Crew has been so poorly funded thanks to CxP and SLS that we might end up buying even more seats from the Russians. Scandalous.

        But I recall reading that with hopes of reusing Orion, and the immense expense of each capsule, not many will be built. So we lose one, and the rest are even more precious, and we become even more terrified of losing one. At some point, the tall pole for a flight might become delays in refurbishment.

        Or consider the hoped-for eventual reusability of Falcons. Right now, the marginal cost of building another booster could be about as low as it’s going to get, due to economies of scale. But if the landing is perfected, fewer will need to be built. At some point, the cost of a new first stage will become great. If there aren’t, what, a couple dozen first stages in the stable, losses (there will eventually be some, if only due to landing failures after a successful launch) and refurb issues will eventually impact the ability to meet a launch date.

        I’ve sidestepped the issue of losing crew. Losing Columbia’s and Challenger’s crew felt, to me, like losing family, even though I knew none of them. I haven’t read Rand’s book yet, but the brutal (and noble) fact is that there are more people willing to climb into the next rocket than there are rockets.

      2. In the end, the Shuttle was a jobs program that occassionally flew in space. The SLS is the same, only it’ll fly much less often.

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