Major funding for the Pulse is provided by a leadership gift from the Sutherland family. The Sutherlands support WHYY and its commitment to the production of programs that improve our quality of life. T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. We have main engine start. 4, 3, 2, 1, and liftoff. Liftoff. On January 28, 1986, a frigid, cold day with an icy blue sky, the space shuttle Challenger launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, 40 years ago. Challenger now heading down range. News stations cover the launch, with millions of school kids across the country watching it live. The shuttle ascends. Then, after 73 seconds, a massive explosion. Billowing smoke trails fill the sky. Stunned silence in mission control. Then... Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. Flight director confirms that. We are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point. The accident killed all seven crew members aboard Challenger. the first fatal in-flight spacecraft disaster in NASA's history. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation later that day. We mourn seven heroes. Michael Smith, Dick Scobie, Judith Resnick, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Krista McAuliffe. For so many people, the explosion came as an absolute shock, says Adam Higginbotham. He detailed the events in his book, Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. This was an organization that seemed to be capable of doing the impossible. They could set anything they set their minds to. They were geniuses. They could do anything. The idea of traveling into space, it just seemed like a grand adventure. Despite the accidents that we all knew at the back of our minds had taken place, it had always seemed to work out. It had always seemed to be an exercise in ingenuity and derring-do. And the Challenger accident really brought home the real risks that were involved. Real risks and a lot of small events building over the course of years, leading towards this catastrophe. What happened is that the engineers involved with these projects started off with extremely strict rules governing safety and their tolerance of risk. And over the years, they began to kind of gradually and subconsciously expand their tolerance of that risk to the point where they ended up doing things that had you come to them when they first started and said, should we do this? They'd have said, absolutely not. That's absolutely not. That's atrociously dangerous. This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. On this episode, remembering Challenger and understanding the impact of this tragedy on NASA, the nation, and on the future of space exploration. Adam Higginbotham was 17 years old when the Challenger accident happened. And those images of the shuttle disintegrating on TV became an indelible part of the collective memory. Adam says to understand how this tragedy happened, you have to go back to the beginnings of the space shuttle program, which officially took off in 1981. It was NASA's attempt at making space travel more frequent, more commonplace and cheaper. The whole idea was that the space shuttle would fly as frequently as once a week, and it would just be this kind of truck or bus that would regularly go into space. He says unlike spacecrafts of the past, these shuttles were reusable. They would launch, explore, land, and be prepared for the next mission. It was going to be so efficient and so routine that technicians would just sort of wipe off the windshield and change the oil and take it back to the launch pad and off it would go again. which, you know, when the shuttle was first conceived, this was a sort of science fiction idea, that you'd have a real spaceship that you could just ride in as if it was a regularly scheduled aeroplane. And the truth was that NASA succeeded in this aim all too effectively. After many successful space shuttle flights, Adam says the public got kind of bored with the whole thing. And this was a problem for NASA because they had convinced themselves, you know, long before the first moon landings took place, that in order to keep congressional funding going, to keep the agency going, to keep the launches going, they needed to keep the public engaged and excited about what they were doing by doing one audacious thing after another, by leaping forward with the technology over and over and over again. And the method that they eventually came up with to re-engage the public with the shuttle program was what they called the Space Flight Participant Program. A contest that would select the first private citizen, a teacher, to fly aboard a NASA shuttle. And the winner, the teacher who will be going into space, Krista McAuliffe. Is that you? Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush introduced the winner, selected out of more than 11,000 applicants. Krista teaches in Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire. She teaches high school social studies. She's been teaching for 12 years. Krista quickly became the face of the mission, and the media was all over the story. Brian Gumbel interviewed her on the Today Show. When you first applied for this, did you think you had even a prayer? I really didn't. I was almost doing it kind of like when you play the lottery. If you don't play it, you don't win. And when I filled out that application, that's really how I felt. I figured there'd be at least 50,000 people across the country who would be slipping that into the mailbox around the same time. What are you most excited about? Seeing the Earth from that perspective of that small planet, you know, it's such a big place here. but being able to look at it from a new perspective. And I hope I can bring that wonder and that excitement back to the students. Maybe just a little bit of fright, too? Not yet. Maybe when I'm strapped in and those rockets are going off underneath me, there will be. But space flight today really seems safe. We had a good example of that when NASA shut down the last one through the computer because one of the backup systems wasn't working. You say it seems safe. A lot of people equate that with it also seems boring. Have you been one who followed NASA? It's hard to hear Krista sound so confident, so cheerful, knowing what happened on January 28th, 1986, 40 years ago. The Challenger was originally scheduled to launch a few days earlier, but it was delayed two times. The first was because of weather. But then on the day, the weather turned out to be perfect for a launch. So that was embarrassing. Then on the second attempt... The crew were taken out to the pad, they were strapped into the seats, the countdown was going, and then at the last minute it turned out that a bolt got stuck on the crew hatchway of the orbiter. and they ended up having to get a hacksaw and saw it off. And by the time they'd done that, hours after they'd started working on this problem, then the weather had again closed in and then the environment was not appropriate for launch. So then they had to scrub that launch too. And these things made it onto the evening news. So this was a really kind of humiliating set of circumstances for NASA. So by the time of the 28th, they were really desperate to go and were prepared to do so regardless of the fact that this time the weather had become incredibly cold. So it seemed that that would prevent the launch too, but they went ahead anyway. On the morning of the launch, obviously, there were people all over the country watching this. and, I mean, the publicity for this was just so intense. There must have been a level of confidence that this would go well for there to be so many, especially children, watching this live. Yes I mean there must have been a level of confidence That kind of that like the understatement of the year I mean a lot of what led into this accident was years of building hubris and complacency within NASA Because the organization had experienced serious accidents before. before. But they had at the same time, you know, achieved all of these amazingly audacious leaps in technology and exploration. You know, they landed men on the surface of the moon and returned them safely to Earth in a project that was accomplished in less than 10 years. I mean, that's amazing. But they'd also managed to turn even their catastrophes into what they felt internally and what they sold to the public as triumphs. When you look back at Apollo 13, when, you know, an explosion on the spacecraft halfway between Earth and the moon crippled the spacecraft and threatened to maroon three astronauts in space, they managed to bring those guys back and safely return them to Earth through, you know, a series of extremely clever improvisations at the last moment. And so that was sold as a kind of amazing triumph in the teeth of failure, not something where, you know, three men could easily have been killed because of technological failure. And so by 1986, this kind of mythos inside NASA of being an agency that could achieve the impossible on a regular basis, had built to the point where they were taking these risks, but they convinced themselves that they'd always got away with it because they were, you know, cleverer than everyone else. Adam Higginbotham is the author of Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. When we come back, before the launch, an engineer raised the alarm about a major problem, but his message was ignored. There was total silence in the room, and then there was a voice from the very back, from someone he couldn't see, and the voice just said, you're right, Rog, we don't want to hear that. And that was essentially the reception he got. That's next on The Pulse. This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're remembering the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which happened 40 years ago. The accident killed all seven crew members, and it shook NASA and the nation. Author Adam Higginbotham details what went wrong in his book, Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. In the investigation that followed the disaster, the main culprit turned out to be the seals in the solid rocket boosters that are strapped to the shuttle, the O-rings, which became infamous. The rocket boosters provide most of the thrust to get the shuttle from the launch pad to the edge of space, and then they separate from the orbiter and fall back to Earth. The solid rockets were absolutely enormous. They were kind of, in principle, they were a bit like fireworks in that they were just packed with solid fuel that once lit could not be extinguished and they couldn't really be controlled in flight. They would just burn for the full two minutes. They couldn't be shut down or restarted. So once they were lit, they were just going to burn for two minutes and they were going to take you where they were going regardless of what you wanted to do or whether there was a problem with them. And they were so enormous, they were 15 stories tall and 12 feet across, that they couldn't be constructed in one monolithic piece. They had to be built in sections. To prevent leaks between the sections, they were sealed with pins and two massive synthetic rubber rings, the O-rings. A bit like the washers in a faucet in a bathroom tap, except that they were 37 feet long and only a quarter of an inch thick. And the tolerances in these joints between these rubber seals were such that if you got anything as small as a piece of lint or a human hair stuck between the metal of the rocket and the synthetic rubber of the ring, then that was enough to cause a leak in the joint. And the problem was that if you got a leak in one of these joints, it wasn't just going to kind of spew a bit of hot gas out for a while and then, you know, eventually you'd make it into space because the gas inside the rockets burned at such temperatures that even a leak, the width of a pencil, would just cut through the half-inch thick steel casing of the rocket like a hot knife through butter. And as soon as that started to happen, the whole rocket would come apart, the external tank of the shuttle would disintegrate, and then the shuttle itself, the part of the system that carried the astronauts, that would be destroyed too. A company called Morton Thiokol, an aerospace contractor, was manufacturing the rocket boosters for NASA. They had worked through a bunch of issues with these O-rings already when another big problem became apparent. In early 1985, the space shuttle Discovery launched during a frigid cold spell in Florida. And when it returned, engineers had found massive damage on the O-rings of the recovered booster rockets. The worst they'd ever seen. In fact, one of the engineers who examined the rocket seals was so astonished at the level of damage to the O-rings that he couldn't understand why the shuttle hadn't simply blown up on the launch pad at the moment of ignition. That engineer was Roger Beaujolais. He realized that extremely cold temperatures made damage to the O-rings, which were already a weak spot, more likely and more severe. And when Roger Beaujolais brought this to the attention of other people in the program, what was the response? Well, Beaujolais was so alarmed at what he found when he was doing his examination of the recovered rockets at Cape Canaveral that he immediately went to the phone and called his bosses back at Morton Thiokol and then arranged to go straight to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, which was the NASA center that was responsible for overseeing the solid rockets, so that he could report his findings and concerns to them in person. He took samples of the burned O-rings with him and he gave this presentation. And he was very nervous about giving the presentation that he gave because he knew that if he was right about the damage that was being caused to these O-rings as a result of cold weather, then this could arrest the whole of the space shuttle program. Basically, they would have to stop flying the shuttle because it was designed to fly in cold weather. So he gave the presentation and then right at the very end, quite nervously, he said to the room, you know, I really don't think you're going to want to hear this, but I think that the cause of this damage that I've seen is low temperatures. And Beaujolais recalled afterwards that there was total silence in the room and then there was a voice from the very back from someone he couldn't see. And the voice just said, you're right, Rog, we don't want to hear that. And that was essentially the reception he got. They would keep working to improve the design. And the attitude was basically these very low temperatures were totally out of the norm for Florida. But the day before the Challenger launch, it became clear that it was going to be ice cold yet again. Well, so what happened is that immediately he got the news. Beaujolais got together with other engineers at Morton Tharkol who had worked on the joint redesign. and pressed their bosses to get NASA to stop the launch. They wanted to make sure that they would put the launch back on hold again and wait at least until temperatures rose to within what they regarded as safe parameters. And so Beaujolais' bosses all agreed, they were absolutely unanimous, that they must go ahead and stop the launch. and they had this big meeting late on the night of January the 27th. And Beaujolais and the other engineers presented their information and they felt that they presented a convincing case that NASA would just have to stop the launch because otherwise they were running a huge risk of catastrophe. But after they presented the information, it became clear that, you know, once again, the NASA middle managers just didn't want to hear it. They really wanted to go ahead with the launch. And although they said if Morton Thiokol continued to recommend against launch they would obviously comply with that they made clear that that was not the outcome they wanted And they essentially bullied the engineers and the Thiokol managers into changing their recommendation. And part of the reason for that was that Thiokol were under enormous pressure to keep NASA, their principal customer, happy. Because they were about to go into meetings and negotiations where NASA had threatened to open up the contract to build the solid rockets, which was worth millions and millions of dollars to Mornthalkel, to open up that contract to competition from other manufacturers. And that meeting was due to take place the next morning on January the 28th. President Reagan called for an investigation into the disaster, the Rogers Commission. And it was only once the Rogers Commission began their investigation that it became clear that there was this long trail of red flags that had been raised by engineers in the 10 years before the accident took place that had been ignored. In your investigation, did you come across any new information, anything that was previously not accessible to the public? I mean, one major thing and one major thing that made a huge difference to the narrative of the book was that I discovered a memoir that had been written by Roger Beaujolais before his death, but had never been published. He'd written like a 600-page memoir that covered his entire career and all of his thought processes and his experience in the years before the accident, his rising concerns about the O-ring seals, his experience at other companies that had made him convinced that if he was confronted with a situation in which his corporate masters wanted to press ahead with something that he thought was unsafe, then he would have to stand up and do something about it. and the memoir I just found buried in an archive at the National Air and Space Museum in Virginia, and it had never been published, and nobody had ever written about it before, and that was something that proved central to being able to reconstruct the story in the detail that I did. So that's one major thing, I think. And what happened to Roger Beaujolais after this accident? How did his story continue? Well, I mean, Beaujolais is really one of the sort of almost unsung heroes of the story. But afterwards, Morton Thiokol, as a corporation, punished Beaujolais, Al McDonald and the other whistleblowers by demoting them or sidelining them. And Roger Beaujolais was so traumatized by what he lived through that in the end never went back to work at Morton Thiokol, left the organization and then never worked in the aerospace industry again. and he was diagnosed with PTSD. He was never the same. From what you could gather reading his memoir, did he feel guilty about not having done more or what was going on with him? He did. He absolutely felt guilty about not having done more, despite the fact that some of his colleagues assured him at the time that he'd done everything he could. You know, he was still attacked, particularly in the aftermath of his testimony. people told him that if he'd really been that convinced that a catastrophe was going to take place then he should have just phoned the White House switchboard himself and tried to get through to the president and tried to get NASA to stop the launch going ahead which of course is kind of absurd but he was also paradoxically blamed by his colleagues at Morton Thiokol for the economic damage that resulted to the company from them being directly blamed for the problems with the solid rockets effectively causing the catastrophe. You know, when people began to lose their jobs, they held Roger Beaujolais responsible. So he was really attacked from both sides. And he was ostracized in the local community and in the end just had to leave. That's Adam Higginbotham. He's the author of Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. Coming up, what changed at NASA in the wake of this tragedy? When Challenger launched, there was a 1 in 25 risk of a catastrophic failure during the launch sequence of the shuttle. But now the contracts that NASA signs with organizations like SpaceX and Boeing stipulate that the risk of catastrophic failure can be no more than 1 in 270. That's still to come on The Pulse. This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. Forty years ago, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, just 73 seconds after launch, shook the nation and NASA. Millions of people were watching live, including schoolchildren, who were especially eager to catch a glimpse of Krista McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire and the first civilian in space. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was that I think in the years since the accident happened, two things happened. One, which was that to the extent that the crew of Challenger was remembered, You know, Krista McAuliffe had become really, as you say, the kind of focus of media attention at the time. And in the years afterwards, she was the one participant in the mission that people remembered. And that in a way, the six other members of the crew that day had begun to be forgotten. So I really wanted to make sure that I could tell the stories of all seven members of the crew and show what extraordinary people they all were. For example, Ron McNair, one of four black astronauts at NASA at the time. I mean, I think that Ron McNair is the one member of the crew who I was just kind of bewildered as not being the subject of his own, like, major biography at this point, because his life was so astonishing. You know, he grew up in a town in South Carolina in the Jim Crow South, a segregated town. he and his brother used to pick cotton to make extra money when school was out and yet he graduated with a doctorate in laser physics from MIT he was a black belt in karate and taught karate to little kids in the community in Houston he was an accomplished jazz musician who had made a plan with the French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre to record a live piece from space on a saxophone that he had planned to take into orbit with him, a piece that Jean-Michel Jarre had written specially for the occasion. I mean, he was just this incredible guy. Ron McNair had flown a prior successful mission in 1984, and Adam says all of the crew members on the Challenger were aware of the risks of spaceflight. They did not know specifically the risks about the O-rings and the story of damage and failure that had preceded the Challenger launch, but they were under no illusions about how dangerous it was. And I did actually have a conversation with Barbara Morgan, who was the Idaho school teacher, who was Krista McAuliffe's backup, who shadowed her through training and would have been the one who, if McAuliffe became ill prior to the launch, Barbara Morgan would have been the person who went instead. And I asked Barbara specifically about this idea that they didn't know, they didn't understand the risks they were taking. And she said that she remembered Dick Scobie, who was the mission commander and whose wife was a teacher, taking them both aside and very carefully explaining to them that this was not the way that it was represented to the public. It was not like climbing onto a scheduled airline aircraft and taking a jaunt into space. This was a dangerous undertaking. And specifically what she said is that he told them that this is an experimental vehicle. There are a million things that could go wrong with it. But the weakest point of the entire system is the human beings. who make the decisions. Did you find any evidence that the crew members themselves were hesitant about this? They were not hesitant. They were convinced that the mission was not going to go ahead that morning because the weather was so cold. There were these massive icicles hanging off the launch gantry. They had to walk across a sheet of ice in order to get from the elevator to the hatch to the crew compartment And this was a concern because at the moment of launch the vibrations and the acoustic shockwaves of the rocket engines igniting would shake all of this stuff loose from the gantry. And if it struck the surface of the orbiter as it left the launch pad, it could damage the heat shield, the tiles protecting the surface of the orbiter, in a way that could damage it as it returned from orbit and destroy the entire spacecraft. So that was one major concern. But there were limits on the temperatures in which the shuttle could launch for that and associated reasons. And it just seemed like the circumstances were too hazardous to take the risk. So because of that part of the cold weather is something that just made each of the astronauts think that this was going to be another occasion on which they were going to ride out to the pad, they were going to strap in, they were going to lie back there for four or five hours, and then eventually mission control would just scrub the launch and they'd say, you know, we're just going to have to leave for another day. And as an astronaut, do you have the ability to say, we should not do this? I don't want to do this? Like, what would happen if you just said no? Well, according to the rules that were in place at the time, nothing would happen. And that's something that changed in the aftermath of the accident. Because at that time, once the launch countdown had advanced to that point, the astronauts themselves had no say at all in the launch decision. It was taken entirely by senior managers at NASA. And so if Dick Scobie had come forward, you know, on the morning of the 28th and said, I'm just not going to do it, There was no official mechanism for that to have an effect. In the aftermath of not just the tragedy, but then the commission and all the findings that came out, what changed at NASA? I mean, a whole lot of things changed. I mean, one of the things that changed was that from that point onwards, an astronaut was always included in the final decision to launch. Almost everyone involved in making the decision to launch Challenger at NASA and Morton Thiokol was either let go or reassigned to other jobs. Most obviously, the boosters themselves, the joints in the boosters were completely redesigned to prevent anything like this ever happening again. And safety and quality assurance organizations were beefed up to make sure it didn't happen again. And ultimately what happened is that the spaceflight participant program was curtailed. And then, you know, the Reagan administration took NASA out of flying commercial payloads into orbit. And that was really the beginning of what we see now as the commercial spaceflight industry. In the wake of this disastrous mission, support for space exploration didn't plummet, as one might expect. No, quite the reverse. Public support for NASA and its mission actually increased in the aftermath of the Challenger accident. You know, people really got behind NASA. And you can't discount the role of the families of the Challenger astronauts in that, because they came out publicly. Actually, on the day of the accident, when Vice President Bush flew down to the Cape to meet the families, they actually said to him, you know, we want to make sure that this accident does not derail the manned spaceflight program. So please make sure that happens. So there were no calls to defund the agency. What there were was calls to have the managers who were responsible for pressing ahead with the decision to launch to be held criminally liable for criminal negligence. And Bill Rogers, who headed the Rogers Commission, eventually gave testimony before a congressional hearing that he saw no basis for that. What's your take on safety now at the agency as far as you can tell? Did the culture really change dramatically in the aftermath of this tragedy? Well, the culture did not really change. And the obvious indication of that is the fact that the shuttle Columbia was lost under extremely similar circumstances and another seven astronauts were killed in 2003. And that's partly because all of these institutional and individual changes that were brought to bear between 1986 and 1988 when the shuttle returned to flight. Over the years between 1988 and 2003, a lot of the people who'd learned the lessons of Challenger in the hardest way that they possibly could, they'd left the agency or retired. And so that institutional memory had been eroded in those years, allowing the same problems to arise again decades later. And it was only after 2003 that NASA eventually instituted an initiative called the Apollo Challenger Columbia Lessons Learn Program, which was an internal effort to make sure that people who worked at NASA never forgot those lessons. And so the culture really did change after 2003. And in the years since then, with the increasing commercialization of the hardware manufacture that NASA uses in its missions these days, the rules governing what constitutes acceptable risk have also been changed. So in retrospect, it turned out that when Challenger launched, there was a 1 in 25 risk of a catastrophic failure during the launch sequence of the shuttle. But now the contracts that NASA signs with organizations like SpaceX and Boeing stipulate that the risk of catastrophic failure can be no more than 1 in 270. So that's an order of magnitude improvement in what is constituted as acceptable risk. And in going through the book, I was struck by all of the competing interests that are always at play. There is the public image of the agency. There is the pressure to do something so that there is excitement about what is happening. There are millions and billions of dollars that have been invested. And it's just like such a big engine that I wondered if real safety culture is possible just because there are so many competing interests at play. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I think that's pretty difficult to escape. You know, because, I mean, the most obvious comparison is with the Soviet space program at the time. At the time of the moon program or of the space shuttle program. You know, there you didn't have the issues of competing companies in a capitalist economy trying to make the most money out of their contracts, right? You've just got state-owned enterprises who manufacture each of the components of the rockets they were launching into space. But what you did have was the problem of how it looks to the public, both within the USSR and globally. And that was what was driving them to do things that were dangerous and ended up killing cosmonauts. And you've got a similar thing, you know, even if you had no kind of economic incentives for people to take risks in the shuttle program, a lot of it was still being driven by the public image of NASA and their concern about how things looked publicly. Yeah. So I just think, I think you're right. There's just, you know, you're never going to get away from, there is always going to be some engine that's driving you forwards to take risks. that might prove to be beyond what they should. But at least now it sounds like the risks are much lower than what they were at the time of this disaster. That's what the contracts say. Adam Higginbotham is the author of Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. This podcast extra was produced by Lindsay Lazarski. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. The Pulse also covered NASA's Viking mission and the New Horizons mission on a recent episode, so be sure to check those out. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.
