Forty years of what if

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. All seven astronauts onboard died. Brian Russell, an engineer who worked on the shuttle, had spent months warning NASA that freezing temperatures could cause a critical seal to fail. In this episode, Brian Russell takes us to the intense meeting where NASA had to decide whether to launch and the 40-year weight of a tragedy he tried to prevent. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  I thought to myself, would I be the only one in this room who would disagree with the launch decision? I asked myself in my mind, do I have the courage to say that?

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  I'm Rana Bilfatah, and on this episode of Throughline from NPR, something a little bit different. We're speaking with Brian Russell, an engineer who rang the alarm bells before the Challenger space shuttle tragedy 40 years ago.

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  And when the launch came down close, I got up on my knees to watch it. And just nervous, as nervous could be. My stomach was just in knots.

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  That conversation when we come back.

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  It was a bitter cold, but sparkling clear morning at Cape Canaveral, here at the last seconds of the countdown.

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  Three, two, one, and liftoff.

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  On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger launched with seven astronauts aboard. Its mission was to get into near-Earth orbit, release satellites, and conduct research.

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  There was a sense of relief that the much-delayed flight was finally underway.

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  But a little over a minute after it launched, something went wrong.

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  These are the spectators that were watching.

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  The shuttle suddenly exploded. The boosters flew off erratically, and the main engine blew apart, with pieces of it flying across the sky and into the ocean.

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  The picture you were just seeing was Christian McCullough's parents watching in horror.

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  Family and friends of several of the astronauts on board the shuttle witnessed the explosion in person. Millions more watched it on live television. None of the astronauts survived.

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  Today, the House Science and Technology Committee begins an intensive series of congressional hearings into the causes and the ramifications of a great national tragedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the loss of seven true American heroes.

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  In the months and years following the explosion, there were multiple investigations into the cause.

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  First, we will look at the technology and the hardware that caused the accident. Second, we will closely examine the management problems and decision-making processes within NASA.

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  It was eventually concluded that the explosion happened because of the failure of something called an O-ring. These are gaskets that form seal joints on rockets, preventing combustion gas leaks by keeping extreme heat and high-pressure exhaust gas from burning through the casing. The company that was contracted by NASA to develop and build rockets for the Challenger was called Morton Thiocall. They had a team that was dedicated to ensuring O-rings were working properly. In the months before the launch, Brian Russell, an engineer on that team, had been warning that if temperatures got too low on the day of the launch, the O-rings might not work properly.

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  And all of this came to a head the day before the launch, when NASA and Morton Thiocall had a check-in after weather forecasts indicated overnight temperatures were going to be very low before the launch.

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  The request came out of that big review of the high NASA managers.

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  This is Brian Russell. He spoke with me from his home in Utah.

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  Who said, go check all of your elements, meaning the solid rocket booster, the external tank, the motors, the orbiter, everybody. Go talk to them and tell them what those temperatures are predicted to be and whether they had any concern. And my boss came into my cubicle and he said, do you have any concerns? And immediately I said, the O-rings.

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  Because of the data that we had, that the O-rings did not behave in a rubbery-type fashion, they became very hard. And so we knew that that was a problem and that that would be an issue in the capability of the O-ring to seal when the pressure hit it. And so that day, I went and pulled our task force together. And we came up and met in my boss's office. And we all decided that we had equal concern in that regard. And so the meetings crescendoed through that day with higher and higher levels of management. And so we communicated back and forth that, hey, we're looking to want to delay that launch. And that was a big deal.

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  Was it a normal thing to ask for a launch delay?

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  No, absolutely not. We had never done it.

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  And in fact, in our contract, there were penalties for us to delay a launch.

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  The contract with NASA stipulated a $10 million penalty if a Thiocall component caused the delay.

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  When we made our recommendation of not launching with an O-ring temperature below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, the response from the lead program manager at NASA was, I don't like to use the title of deity in vain, but he said, my Thiocall, when do you expect me to launch? Next April?

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  That just shook us. Because we thought that we had put together a logical enough presentation to justify not launching below 53 degrees. And I realized that this wasn't going to be a simple-type thing.

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  I realized the tables were turning. And then the program manager at our plant, he asked for a five-minute caucus, a muted caucus, that we put our phone on mute. And we were going to discuss then their counterargument to what we had originally proposed.

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  And what happened during that five minutes?

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  Through that discussion, the five-minute caucus grew to a 35-minute caucus. Our general manager.

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  The phone is on mute the whole time?

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  We were on mute the whole time. NASA was waiting for us to finish our discussion so that we would respond to them. Our general manager was there, and he was in favor of launching. And I thought, oh, man, we're in trouble.

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  Two of Brian's superiors at Morton Thiocall, Roger Boljolay and Arnie Thompson, got up and argued for the delay.

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  And they got up and stood at the head of the table and were pointing at charts and pointing at photos and making the same arguments. And finally, the general manager said, we've plowed this ground already. After he said that, we stopped debating. He began polling the people in the room. And I remember, I looked over the room, across the room, at Roger and Arnie, and they were very dejected. And I thought to myself, would I be the only one in this room who would disagree with the launch decision? And I asked myself in my mind, do I have the courage to say that?

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  And you must have been one of the youngest in the room.

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  I was. And our general manager only polled the senior leaders, the vice presidents. So he polled his assistant general manager. He said he agreed to launch. And then he asked my boss, and he agreed to launch. And then he turned to the vice president of engineering. And he was in a really tough position because it was his engineers who were arguing to delay. He hummed and hawed and hesitated to answer. And that's when our general manager said, take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.

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  There are different interpretations in that room. Some of my colleagues felt that the boss was telling him to forget about engineering principles and get in line. Whereas I felt that the general manager was telling him, you are the chief engineer of our company, and a manager needs to make a decision. And therefore, you need to make a decision. And because NASA wouldn't have launched over our objections. If we had come back and said, we still object, they wouldn't have launched over our objections. But that vice president ultimately answered yes. And our general manager didn't poll anybody else in the room like I thought he might.

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  So you didn't get a vote?

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  No.

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  So we went back off mute and told them that we agreed to launch. And, uh, and, uh,

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  I was just really worked up in my mind and in my stomach that, uh, of what had happened. And, uh, I was just wrestling in my mind and uneasy about everything that had gone on. We went out and prepared a final chart. Unfortunately, I'm the one who typed that up. I wish I'd have just walked away, but being the junior guy, I'm not even sure if those older guys knew how to work a typewriter. And, uh, but I caught Roger Bojolay in the hallway going home when, when both of us were leaving for the parking lot. I said, Roger, the tables had been turned in that argument.

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  In every other argument that we had had with NASA, justifications that we made, we had to prove the launch was safe. And in that phone call, we had to prove that it was unsafe.

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  I mean, that, that's so hard that you were, you know, your heart was telling you this launch shouldn't happen. You end up just by circumstance, happenstance, to be the one sending this fax saying the launch is a go. You go home that night. I mean, do you get any sleep?

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  Well, I got home about 11:30 and my wife was still up. Our kids were in bed, but I was so worked up that I just was talking a mile a minute for 45 minutes, telling her what had happened through the day and what the decision was and what my feelings were about it. And I was just really wound up and I wasn't sure how much sleep I would get.

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  He didn't get much. The next morning, he made the commute back to the office to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger launch, along with millions of other people in the US and around the world.

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  I went into the conference room to watch it where the television feed came in. And I was sitting on the floor toward the back. And, and when the launch came down close, I got up on my knees to, to watch it. And, uh, just nervous, as nervous could be. My stomach was just in knots. We thought it would fail on the launch pad. We thought that's when the burn through would happen and that we'd have an explosion and, and that it would just be absolutely dreadful. And when it cleared the tower, the fellow sitting next to me, who was a manager himself, he turned to me and said, we dodged a bullet. And I don't remember if I spoke it out loud

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  or if I, uh, said it to my mind, but I, I, I remember at least thinking, I wish I could be sure.

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  90 seconds and counting. The 51L mission ready to go.

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  So as the launch proceeded.

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  And liftoff.

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  And we saw it go through, past the throttle up stage.

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  Go with throttle up.

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  And when I saw the explosion.

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  My God.

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  I couldn't believe what I had seen. And they replayed it. And that's when it sank in. And I thought, that's our problem.

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  I just knew it in my heart that that was the issue. After the first viewing of it, I saw Roger in the front of the room, get up and leave. And so after the second time,

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  when it sank in, I, I did the same. And I went downstairs to his office. And he was in tears.

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  And I was in tears.

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  I went back to my cubicle and just sat in a daze. And, and it was just, there wasn't any work that was, that was done that day. Just people wandering around in confusion about what had happened. And, uh, and it just was such a devastating feeling. And I thought of the loss of our astronauts and the disaster for the whole Space Shuttle program. And, uh, I was just profoundly sad. I don't know how to explain it any better.

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  I, I mean, I can't imagine, especially given everything that had happened just the day earlier, the conversations, the warning.

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  That feeling must have been layered for you.

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  I went through, uh, all sorts of emotions. The sadness, the anger, the disillusionment, confusion. And, and those feelings would just cycle through my mind. And I couldn't think of anything else. It, it changed my personality. I wasn't a very good husband during that time. I wasn't a very good father because I couldn't get the image out of my mind's eye right. It seemed to be right in my forehead that all I could see was that explosion and what it meant. And that lasted for about four months.

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  I couldn't be myself. I just couldn't. It was processing grief. And, uh, the grief and even the guilt has remained.

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  I wish so badly that I had said at the end of that caucus, even though we as a company agreed to launch, I wish that I had said, there's a dissenting view here.

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  After being a part of that

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  and after feeling a portion of the guilt of it, the only thing you can do afterward is to try and live your life in a way that you respect others, you encourage others to, to be a part of decisions, to be a part of important things, whether it's engineering decisions or whether it's just interpersonal familial relationships, that you have respect for other people and you even ask for their feelings on, and their thoughts on matters. And you just try to live your best life in that regard. That's really all you can do because you can't change the past.

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  Even over a 40-year span, I still feel it deeply. And it's had that kind of an impact.

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  You know, there's been a lot of explanations posited by scientists and writers about what, what went wrong. And there's this one, you know, prominent idea that emerged called the normalization of deviance. And I'd love to get your take on it because, you know, it's basically it's this idea that, you know, over time, organizations start to accept, I guess, shortcuts or perhaps poor oversight because most of the time, normally it works out. And that in this case, the explanation is, well, the O-rings, yes, they had some potential risk, but it all fell under this sort of normal risk parameter. And so it wasn't taken seriously enough as a result of that.

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  What do you make of that kind of analysis? Which really gained a lot of prominence in the years after.

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  It did. And I, I read that book back in the time that term was coined. And, and, and there is truth in that, that there can be and, and is in organizations and was in our case, some normalization of deviance. But I think it was oversimplified in that it didn't take into account the fact that we did some very extensive testing and analysis that led us to the belief that it was a self-limiting event, that, that it would only erode for a split second and then it would stop. And so the, the premise out there of the normalization of deviance tends to make people believe, oh, it's okay.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  We've already seen this. It's no big deal. Whereas underneath the surface, we were working hard to try and come up with a fix and yet still continue to fly. Now, there are lots of smart people in the world who can figure out solutions to problems. I, I think the biggest challenge is in the way that we deal with each other, how we communicate, how we encourage others, even underlings, to speak up when it's maybe going against the grain of the commonly held positions of, of safety and that sort of a thing, that we encourage that, that we evaluate it. And, and the difficulty then is which problems need to be solved

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  before we proceed and which problems can we solve along the way? There's no magic answer for that, but we certainly need to be thinking hard about that.

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  That's, I think, incredibly valuable.

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  I just have one last question, which is, when you watch a rocket launch these days, do you still get that feeling of excitement and awe that you did when you were a young engineer?

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  Yes, I do. I love what we're doing along those lines. This, this opportunity to go back to the moon, to even go to Mars, I just think is fantastic. And we're still in the infancy of, of all of this thought. You know, we're so far away from Star Trek. But to progress toward that, I think, is a marvelous thing. And I do get excited about it.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  That was Brian Russell, former engineer at Morton Thyocall. After 1986, Brian went on to a lengthy and successful career as an engineer, but has spoken and written extensively about the lessons of the Challenger disaster. You can hear more about the legacy of that tragedy in a story that aired earlier this year by NPR's Sunday Story from Up First. It's called Challenger at 40: Lessons From a Tragedy.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  And that's it for today's show. This episode was produced by Ramtin Adeblii and edited by Irene Noguchi with help from the Throughline production team. Ramtin made all the music and Jimmy Keeley mixed the episode. Fact checking was done by Greta Pittenger. Special thanks to Howard Burkus and Johannes Dergi. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Thanks for listening.

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