5.1 The Challenger Accident and its Aftermath

¶The inherently vulnerable design of the Space Shuttle, described in Chapter 1, was a product of policy and technological compromises made at the time of its approval in 1972. That approval process also produced unreasonable expectations, even myths, about the Shuttleʼs future performance that NASA tried futilely to fulfill as the Shuttle became "operational" in 1982. At first, NASA was able to maintain the image of the Shuttle as an operational vehicle. During its early years of operation, the Shuttle launched satellites, performed on-orbit research, and even took members of Congress into orbit. At the beginning of 1986, the goal of "routine access to space" established by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 was ostensibly being achieved. That appearance soon proved illusory. On the cold morning of January 28, 1986, the Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its climb towards orbit. On board were Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnick, Ronald E. McNair, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory B. Jarvis. All perished.

¶Rogers Commission

¶On February 3, 1986, President Reagan created the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, which soon became known as the Rogers Commission after its chairman, former Secretary of State William Rogers. The Commissionʼs report, issued on June 6, 1986, concluded that the loss of Challenger was caused by a failure of the joint and seal between the two lower segments of the right Solid Rocket Booster. Hot gases blew past a rubber O-ring in the joint, leading to a structural failure and the explosive burning of the Shuttleʼs hydrogen fuel. While the Rogers Commission identified the failure of the Solid Rocket Booster joint and seal as the physical cause of the accident, it also noted a number of NASA management failures that contributed to the catastrophe.

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¶The Rogers Commission concluded "the decision to launch the Challenger was flawed." Communication failures, incomplete and misleading information, and poor management judgments all figured in a decision-making process that permitted, in the words of the Commission, "internal flight safety problems to bypass key Shuttle managers." As a result, if those making the launch decision "had known all the facts, it is highly unlikely that they would have decided to launch." Far from meticulously guarding against potential problems, the Commission found that NASA had required "a contractor to prove that it was not safe to launch, rather than proving it was safe."¹¹ Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, June 6, 1986, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1986), Vol. I, p. 82, 118.

¶The Commission also found that NASA had missed warning signs of the impending accident. When the joint began behaving in unexpected ways, neither NASA nor the Solid Rocket Motor manufacturer Morton-Thiokol adequately tested the joint to determine the source of the deviations from specifications or developed a solution to them, even though the problems frequently recurred. Nor did they respond to internal warnings about the faulty seal. Instead, Morton-Thiokol and NASA management came to see the problems as an acceptable flight risk – a violation of a design requirement that could be tolerated.²² Report of the Presidential Commission, Vol. I, p. 48.

¶During this period of increasing uncertainty about the jointʼs performance, the Commission found that NASAʼs safety system had been "silent." Of the management, organizational, and communication failures that contributed to the accident, four related to faults within the safety system, including "a lack of problem reporting requirements, inadequate trend analysis, misrepresentation of criticality, and lack of involvement in critical discussions."³³ Report of the Presidential Commission, Vol. I, p. 52. The checks and balances the safety system was meant to provide were not working.

¶Still another factor influenced the decisions that led to the accident. The Rogers Commission noted that the Shuttleʼs increasing flight rate in the mid-1980s created schedule pressure, including the compression of training schedules, a shortage of spare parts, and the focusing of resources on near-term problems. NASA managers "may have forgotten–partly because of past success, partly because of their own well-nurtured image of the program–that the Shuttle was still in a research and development phase."⁴⁴ Report of the Presidential Commission, Vol. I, pp. 164-165.

¶The Challenger accident had profound effects on the U.S. space program. On August 15, 1986, President Reagan announced that "NASA will no longer be in the business of launching private satellites." The accident ended Air Force and intelligence community reliance on the Shuttle to launch national security payloads, prompted the decision to abandon the yet-to-be-opened Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and forced the development of improved expendable launch vehicles.⁶⁶ Report of The National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office: The NRO at the Crossroads, November 2000, p. 66. Roger Guillemette, "Vandenberg: Space Shuttle Launch and Landing Site, Part 1," Spaceflight, October 1994, pp. 354-357, and Roger Guillemette, "Vandenberg: Space Shuttle Launch and Landing Site, Part 2," Spaceflight, November 1994, pp. 378-381; Dennis R. Jenkins, Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System – The First 100 Missions (Cape Canaveral, FL, Specialty Press, 2001), pp. 467- 476.Show full note A 1992 White House advisory committee concluded that the recovery from the Challenger

SELECTED ROGERS COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS

"The faulty Solid Rocket Motor joint and seal must be changed. This could be a new design eliminating the joint or a redesign of the current joint and seal. No design options should be prematurely precluded because of schedule, cost or reliance on existing hardware. All Solid Rocket Motor joints should satisfy the following:
"The joints should be fully understood, tested and verified."
"The certification of the new design should include:
Tests which duplicate the actual launch configuration as closely as possible.
Tests over the full range of operating conditions, including temperature."
"Full consideration should be given to conducting static firings of the exact flight configuration in a vertical attitude."
"The Shuttle Program Structure should be reviewed. The project managers for the various elements of the Shuttle program felt more accountable to their center management than to the Shuttle program organization."
"NASA should encourage the transition of qualified astronauts into agency management positions."
"NASA should establish an Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance to be headed by an Associate Administrator, reporting directly to the NASA Administrator. It would have direct authority for safety, reliability, and quality assurance throughout the agency. The office should be assigned the work force to ensure adequate oversight of its functions and should be independent of other NASA functional and program responsibilities."
"NASA should establish an STS Safety Advisory Panel reporting to the STS Program Manager. The charter of this panel should include Shuttle operational issues, launch commit criteria, flight rules, flight readiness and risk management."
"The Commission found that Marshall Space Flight Center project managers, because of a tendency at Marshall to management isolation, failed to provide full and timely information bearing on the safety of flight 51-L [the Challenger mission] to other vital elements of Shuttle program management … NASA should take energetic steps to eliminate this tendency at Marshall Space Flight Center, whether by changes of personnel, organization, indoctrination or all three."
"The nationʼs reliance on the Shuttle as its principal space launch capability created a relentless pressure on NASA to increase the flight rate … NASA must establish a flight rate that is consistent with its resources."5 disaster cost the country $12 billion, which included the cost of building the replacement Orbiter Endeavour.⁷⁷ Vice Presidentʼs Space Policy Advisory Board, A Post Cold War Assessment of U.S. Space Policy, December 1992, p. 6.

¶It took NASA 32 months after the Challenger accident to redesign and requalify the Solid Rocket Booster and to return the Shuttle to flight. The first post-accident flight was launched on September 29, 1988. As the Shuttle returned to flight, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Flight Richard Truly commented, "We will always have to treat it [the Shuttle] like an R&D test program, even many years into the future. I donʼt think calling it operational fooled anybody within the program … It was a signal to the public that shouldnʼt have been sent."⁸⁸ Quoted in John M. Logsdon, "Return to Flight: Richard H. Truly and the Recovery from the Challenger Accident," in Pamela E. Mack, editor, From Engineering to Big Science: The NACA and NASA Collier Trophy Research Project Winners, NASA SP-4219 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1998), p. 363.

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¶The Shuttle Program After Return to Flight

¶After the Rogers Commission report was issued, NASA made many of the organizational changes the Commission recommended. The space agency moved management of the Space Shuttle Program from the Johnson Space Center to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. The intent of this change was to create a management structure "resembling that of the Apollo program, with the aim of preventing communication deficiencies that contributed to the Challenger accident."⁹⁹ Aviation Week & Space Technology, November 10, 1986, p. 30. NASA also established an Office of Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance at its Headquarters, though that office was not given the "direct authority" over all of NASAʼs safety operations as the Rogers Commission had recommended. Rather, NASA human space flight centers each retained their own safety organization reporting to the Center Director.

¶In the almost 15 years between the return to flight and the loss of Columbia, the Shuttle was again being used on a regular basis to conduct space-based research, and, in line with NASAʼs original 1969 vision, to build and service a space station. The Shuttle flew 87 missions during this period, compared to 24 before Challenger. Highlights from these missions include the 1990 launch, 1993 repair, and 1999 and 2002 servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope; the launch of several major planetary probes; a number of Shuttle-Spacelab missions devoted to scientific research; nine missions to rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir; the return of former Mercury astronaut Senator John Glenn to orbit in October 1998; and the launch of the first U.S. elements of the International Space Station.

¶After the Challenger accident, the Shuttle was no longer described as "operational" in the same sense as commercial aircraft. Nevertheless, NASA continued planning as if the

¶Shuttle could be readied for launch at or near whatever date was set. Tying the Shuttle closely to International Space Station needs, such as crew rotation, added to the urgency of maintaining a predictable launch schedule. The Shuttle is currently the only means to launch the already-built European, Japanese, and remaining U.S. modules needed to complete Station assembly and to carry and return most experiments and on-orbit supplies.¹⁰¹⁰ There are proposals for using other U.S. systems, in development but not yet ready for flight, to provide an alternate U.S. means of station access. These "Alternate Access to Space" proposals have not been evaluated by the Board. Even after three occasions when technical problems grounded the Shuttle fleet for a month or more, NASA continued to assume that the Shuttle could regularly and predictably service the Station. In recent years, this coupling between the Station and Shuttle has become the primary driver of the Shuttle launch schedule. Whenever a Shuttle launch is delayed, it impacts Station assembly and operations.

¶In September 2001, testimony on the Shuttleʼs achievements during the preceding decade by NASAʼs then-Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Flight William Readdy indicated the assumptions under which NASA was operating during that period:

¶The Space Shuttle has made dramatic improvements in the capabilities, operations and safety of the system.

¶The payload-to-orbit performance of the Space Shuttle has been significantly improved – by over 70 percent to the Space Station. The safety of the Space Shuttle has also been dramatically improved by reducing risk by more than a factor of five. In addition, the operability of the system has been significantly improved, with five minute launch windows – which would not have been attempted a decade ago – now becoming routine. This record of success is a testament to the quality and dedication of the Space Shuttle management team and workforce, both civil servants and contractors.¹¹¹¹ Testimony of William F. Readdy to the Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, U.S. Senate, September 6, 2001.