Allan J. McDonald - Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

The Place of the McDonald Memoir in Challenger History

JAMES R. HANSEN

The fiery destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, with seven American astronauts aboard, including the first ordinary citizen, a beloved schoolteacher, happened more than two decades ago. One might think that historians have duly recordedand that the technical aerospace community has fully comprehended for some timeexactly why the U.S. space program's first fatal in-flight accident occurred on the cold, heartless morning of January 28, 1986. Surely, the facts underlying the horrible tragedy of Challenger (STS-51L) must have all surfaced by now, all the evidence fully examined and reexamined, all the expert testimony scrutinized, all the critical failure points analyzed and digested, all the penetrating engineering studies performed, all the revelatory books and articles written, all the important lessons learned.

It is not the case.

Surprisingly, until Allan J. McDonald, former director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for Morton Thiokol, Inc., came forward with his remarkable first-person story, no one directly involved in the decision to launch Challenger had published a memoir about the experience. No accountfirsthand or otherwisehad penetrated all of the factors leading to the accident. No book had critically evaluated all the testimony given to the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (popularly known as the Rogers Commission, after its chair, former secretary of state William P. Rogers), and none had done a comprehensively effective job of pointing out the conflicts of testimony and other evidence that demonstrated that some form of cover-up had taken place.

Allan McDonald's memoir now contributes all of that and more. It addresses what happened to the people at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Morton Thiokol who were involved in the ill-fated decision to launch Challenger, and it contains McDonald's own deeply personal recollections of his traumatic travails as he fought to draw attention to the real reasons behind the disaster and to the fact that some of the responsible individuals in NASA and his own company, Morton Thiokol, were doing their very best to cover up those reasons. McDonald's remarkable storyone revealing the character of the very best type of whistle-bloweruncovers the acts of retribution directed against him by his company and by NASA, as well as the protective measures that had to be taken by the Rogers Commission and by Congress to preserve his job at Thiokol. The memoir lays bare Thiokol's reluctance in giving him the job of leading the redesign of the Space Shuttle's defective solid rocket motor following his controversial role in the Challenger investigation, and it addresses the many serious difficulties encountered in that critically important redesign program, whose goal was to restore the Space Shuttle as soon as possible to safe flight. This two-and-a-half-year solid rocket motor (SRM) redesign programdone under the bright spotlights of a hyperactive media, with technical oversight provided by the National Research Council (NRC), along with input solicited by NASA from the entire U.S. propulsion communitywas arguably the most scrutinized engineering project in American history. The result, initially called the redesigned solid rocket motor (and which later came to be known as the reusable solid rocket motor to retain its original acronym of RSRM), became the safest and most reliable propulsion system currently flying on the Shuttleso successful that NASA in 2005 selected an upgraded five-segment version of the reusable solid rocket motor as the booster propulsion system of choice for the Ares I crew launch vehicle, which will replace the Shuttle in 2010, and in conjunction with the larger Ares V heavy-lift cargo vehicle that will possibly take American astronauts back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars.

McDonald's memoir is also critically important because it explores early warnings from the first two flights after Challenger (in 1988) of the very same serious debris problems that would later result in the tragic loss of another Shuttle,