The Deadly Seal

             

Roger Boisjoly would not take “No” for an answer. An aerospace engineer at the Morton-Thiokol company, he was gravely concerned about the safety of Space Shuttle launches. His Utah-based employer built the Shuttle’s external rockets. Even during early testing of the rockets, he feared that a design flaw in its external rockets might cause a Shuttle to explode on launch.
Since the early 1980s, Boisjoly (pronounced like Beaujolais wine) had been his company’s senior structural engineer (technically a fluid dynamacist and aerodynamicist) overseeing the development and construction of the rockets’ casings and heading the company’s effort to redesign their seals and joints.

            Sections of the rockets’ massive cylinders were manufactured separately. When they were assembled one on top of each other, massive O-rings separated the giant metal rings, and the structures were united in a joint sealed with putty. Together they kept superheated gases from leaking. 
              During the design process, however, the company altered the manner in which the cylinders were built (partly to cut costs), and their assembly also deviated from the original engineering plans.

Loss of resiliency

From inspecting severely eroded seals from earlier missions, Boisjoly, who had worked in the space program since Apollo, knew that at low temperatures the rubbery O-rings became brittle, and their loss of resiliency might cause fiery gases from inside the rockets to leak, causing a catastrophe.

            When the Space Shuttle Challenger launched on the morning of January 28, 1986, the temperature was 36 degrees, 15 degrees colder than on the day of any previous launch. Seventy-three seconds after lift-off, what Boisjoly feared happened. The right solid-rocket booster suffered a catastrophic structural failure. The Challenger erupted into a fireball, killing all seven astronauts.

            Six months before the disaster, Boisjoly had written a memo to his company’s senior vice president, predicting the O-rings would fail causing a “result [that] would be catastrophic of the highest order—loss of human life.”

Partly due to his concerns, the company formed a task force to study the effects of cold on the O-rings; sadly, however, the project became bogged down in paperwork and the feverish demands of keeping Shuttle launches on schedule.

            The night before the launch Boisjoly and his colleagues argued for hours with their company’s executives, pleading with them to tell NASA to postpone lift-off. Finally, Morton-Thiokol told NASA to delay the launch. In response, NASA's deputy director of science and engineering George Hardy told Morton-Thiokol: “I am appalled by your recommendation.” Another NASA executive said, “God sake, Thiokol, when do you expect me to launch—next April?”

            As a result of this phone conference, Morton Thiokol reversed its decision and gave NASA its blessing to proceed.

            “I fought like hell to stop that launch,” Boisjoly later said.

            He mistakenly believed the Challenger would explode at the moment the rockets ignited. As it rose into the sky, he became increasingly relieved. The first minute after launch is the most dangerous. During that period, the spaceship passes through “maximum dynamic pressure” when the physical forces on the vehicle are greatest. 

Time of greatest danger

           Immediately after lift-off the rockets are actually throttled down to reduce stresses on the spacecraft. At 68 seconds into the flight, ground control told the Shuttle, “Go at throttle up,” meaning that the time of greatest danger had passed, and the rockets could now rev up and 100 percent of their power.

            Boisjoly felt slightly relieved. A colleague turned to him, saying “Oh, God! We made it!”

            “Roger, go at throttle up,” replied mission commander Richard Scobee, sending the last transmission from the shuttle. Seconds later the Shuttle disintegrated.

            Some criticized Boisjoly for not verbally dissenting from his company’s final decision when it was made on the conference call.

“I never [would] take [away] any management right to take the input of an engineer and then make a decision based upon that input, and I truly believe that,” he later said. “There was no point in me doing anything any further than I had already attempted to do…[but] I left the room feeling badly defeated. I personally felt that management was under a lot of pressure to launch and that they made a very tough decision, but I didn’t agree with it.”

Boisjoly spent the next 24 years lecturing on business ethics. He received the Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1988.

MORAL: Stand your ground.

Speak up for what is right.

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