I finished reading Challenger about the space shuttle disaster — a thorough and thought-provoking read. A few reflections for the next couple of dots…
NASA was in its glory days with nearly unlimited funds and huge public support in the 1960s as it sought to fulfill JFK’s challenge to put men on the moon. But once that was accomplished, budgets, prestige, and public interest waned, forcing the agency to make concessions, promise unrealistic deadlines, and take more risks than usual to keep on an impossible schedule designed to appease appropriations committees.
If Challenger accomplishes anything, it’s convincing you that space travel is unbelievably complex. There were hundreds of sub-contractors, working in multiple locations across the country, not just to build custom parts and systems that had never been made before, but to have them meet extreme parameters that were just estimates. No one really knew how hot the heat shield would get, how the rockets would react to temperature changes, how the Earth’s atmosphere would impact the spaceship, or thousands of other variables. And then all this had to happen with inadequate budgets and unachievable deadlines.
To avert as much tragedy as possible, NASA had multiple layers of review processes to identify which elements were “mission critical” (and thus required redundancies) vs. which were “acceptable risk”, and to receive assurances from those closest to the components whether they were “go” for flight. In theory, the system was designed to resolve any issues before a spacecraft was cleared to launch, but in reality, the whole system hinged on one layer reporting the salient information to the next layer — thus it often functioned like a high-stakes game of the telephone game.
More on the consequences of that tomorrow…
Source: Challenger by Adam Higginbotham, 2024
