NASA blamed for shuttle disaster
Warnings of danger from booster seal were overlooked, panel says
WASHINGTON --The shuttle Challenger perished for want of an adequate seal on one of its solid rocket boosters, but the presidential commission that investigated the tragedy attributed the failure yesterday to a space bureaucracy that ignored proper safety procedures, overlooked a faulty seal design and overruled dire warnings against launching the shuttle.
The commission, citing human and mechanical failures that it concluded were avoidable, said in a scathing indictment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that the Jan. 28 decision to launch the Challenger with its crew of seven was "seriously flawed."
The 256-page commission report, complete with color photographs of the shuttle's plume of smoke at liftoff and its fiery explosion 72 seconds later, described the accident as "rooted in NASA's history."
The report suggested that the seeds of the disaster lay in the agency's overambitious effort to launch more missions than it was capable of handling.
"The unrelenting pressure to meet the demands of an accelerating flight schedule might have been adequately handled by NASA if it had insisted upon the exactingly thorough procedures that were its hallmark during the Apollo program" that placed men on the moon, the commission said.
In that context, the commission said that the booster seal problem "began with the faulty design of its joint and increased as both NASA and contractor management first failed to recognize it as a problem, then failed to fix it and finally treated it as an acceptable flight risk."
The commission report, delivered yesterday to President Reagan by William P. Rogers, the commission chairman and former secretary of state, urged that the shuttle program be retained.
But it also pressed for a series of major changes at NASA, including a complete redesign of the booster joint, creation of both a safety office with a role in launch decisions and an independent review panel, institution of improved landing safety and crew escape procedures and elaboration of a series of steps to improve communications within the agency.
And in a recommendation that could lead to a fundamental change in NASA's and the nation's space agenda, the commission also suggested that it is unwise to rely on manned shuttles alone to lift payloads into space.
That suggestion is sure to fuel support for a mixed fleet of manned shuttle orbiters and unmanned throwaway rockets.
President Reagan, who received the report during a White House Rose Garden ceremony, was noncommittal about its recommendations, although aides said they believe he will order almost all of them adopted.
"This has been a difficult passage for America, but we will go on just as the crew of the Challenger would have wanted us to," Reagan said. "We'll use every ounce of American skill, ingenuity and gumption, and we'll work twice as hard and be twice as vigilant.
"We'll simply do what has to be done to make our space program safe and reliable and a renewed source of pride to our nation," he said.
In detailing the evidence it amassed during its four-month inquiry, the commission said the launch decision was made in the face of warnings, on paper over time and in meetings just hours before liftoff, that the launch might well lead to the very tragedy that occurred.
Indeed, according to the commission report, an engineer for Morton Thiokol, the company that built the rocket booster, complained in a July 1985 memorandum about problems with the O-ring seal, and expressed fears that failure to fix it might prove fatal.
"The result," concluded a Thiokol vice president, Robert K. Lund, ''would be a catastrophe of the highest order -- loss of human life."
Similar concerns were raised by Thiokol engineers during a telephone conference on the night of Jan. 27 with officials of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which oversaw the booster rocket program, according to transcripts of commission testimony included in the report.
During the initial phase of that conference, Thiokol engineers said the freezing weather at Cape Canaveral might prevent the the rubber O-ring seals from expanding properly on liftoff. They argued that the flight should be delayed.
Roger Boisjoly, one of the Thiokol engineers, testified before the commission that prior launches in temperatures no colder than 51 degrees Fahrenheit had led to erosion of the seals because they had become rigid from the cold. The temperature was 38 degrees when Challenger lifted off, and it had dropped well below freezing on the night before the launch.
Referring to the O-ring, Boisjoly testified, "It would be likened to trying to shove a brick into a crack, versus a sponge."
A Thiokol engineer, Allan J. McDonald, testified that during the Jan. 27 telephone conference, he expressed concern that a decision to launch would be unwise.
"I made the statement that if we're wrong and something goes wrong on this flight, I wouldn't want to have to be the person to stand up in front of board of inquiry and say that I went ahead and told them to go ahead and fly that thing," McDonald told the commission.
Despite the warnings, George Hardy, the Marshall center's deputy director of science and technology, said he was "appalled" at the eleventh-hour recommendation to scrub the launch. In addition, the commission said, Lawrence B. Mulloy, NASA's manager of the rocket booster program at Marshall, said he also found the recommendation unacceptable.
Faced with such resistance, Thiokol's senior vice president, Jerald Mason, turned to Lund, the engineering vice president, and "asked him to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat," Boisjoly testified. ''From this point on, management formulated the points to base their decision on."
And Thiokol management overruled its engineers.
"The commission concluded that the Thiokol management reversed its position and recommended the launch, at the urging of Marshall and contrary to the views of its engineers in order to accommodate a major customer," the report said.
During the inquiry, Mulloy, the rocket booster director, told the commission that he had informed top managers at Cape Canaveral of the O-ring problems.
Rogers, the panel chairman, then asked him: "Why wasn't that a cause for concern on the part of the whole NASA organization?"
"It was cause for concern, sir," Mulloy replied.
When Rogers asked him whom he had told about the O-ring problems, Mulloy said: "Everyone, sir."
The commission, however, assailed Mulloy's credibility after NASA's top managers professed ignorance of the problems and said they would have canceled the launch had they known of them.
"It is disturbing to the commission that contrary to the testimony" of Mulloy, "the seriousness of concern was not conveyed" to top officials, the report said.
The 13-member commission, composed chiefly of former astronauts and engineers and physicists, was troubled by evidence that the O-rings had been damaged during past flights, and had experienced trouble on all previous flights that were launched at temperatures lower than 63 degrees.
"NASA and Thiokol," the report said, "accepted escalating risk apparently because they 'got away with it last time.' "
"The decision-making was 'a kind of Russian roulette,' " it added.
"The commission concluded that there was a serious flaw in the decision- making process leading up to the launch of flight 51-L," the report declared, using the numerical designation of the Challenger flight.
"A well-structured and managed system emphasizing safety would have flagged the rising doubts about the solid rocket booster joint seal," the study added. "Had these matters been clearly stated and emphasized in the flight readiness process in terms reflecting the views of the Thiokol enginners and at least some of the Marshall engineers, it seems likely that the launch of 51-L might not have occurred when it did."
As the commission learned, however, Thiokol was not alone in urging that the launch be delayed. Engineers at Rockwell International, which built the shuttle, made a similar recommendation.
Because of the ice buildup prompted by the unusually cold weather, Rockwell officials expressed fears that ice breaking free on liftoff might damage the shuttle's tiles and perhaps be sucked into the shuttle engines.
The commission concluded that the Rockwell recommendation was not clearly communicated to NASA officials.
The panel determined that the ice played no rule in the disaster. But it said, "The commission finds the decision to launch questionable under those circumstances. In this situation, NASA appeared to be requiring a contractor to prove that it was not safe to launch, rather than proving it was safe."
It also found that the ice buildup on the shuttle before liftoff might have made it difficult for the crew to evacuate the vessel on the launch pad, had that been necessary.
The report said: "The commission believes that the severe cold and the presence of so much ice on the fixed service structure made it inadvisable to launch on the morning of Jan. 28, and that margins of safety were whittled down too far."
In its report, the commission was especially critical of the Marshall Space Flight Center. Several key officials at Marshall either have retired or have been transferred since the inquiry began.
"As the flight rate increased, the Marshall safety, reliability and quality assurance work force was decreasing, which adversely affected mission safety."
Overall, it said, "organizational structures at Cape Canaveral and Marshall have placed safety, reliability and quality assurance offices under the supervision of the very organizations and activities whose efforts they are to check."
After the liftoff, crew was doomed
WASHINGTON -- The Rogers Commission made it clear yesterday in its report that once the disastrous sequence began on the Challenger mission, there was no way to save the mission and its crew.
"During the period of the flight when the solid rocket boosters are thrusting, there are no survivable abort options," the commission declared. ''There was nothing that either the crew or the ground controllers could have done to avert the catastrophe."
With hindsight that was not available last Jan. 28, the panel determined that the first physical evidence of trouble appeared just .678 seconds after the shuttle Challenger and its crew of seven, including the teacher Christa McAuliffe, lifted off the Cape Canaveral launch pad.
The evidence, based on the commission's analysis of photography, showed that a "strong puff of gray smoke was spurting from the vicinity of the aft field joint on the right solid rocket booster."
The vaporized material streaming from the joint, the commission said, ''indicated there was not complete sealing action within the joint" of the booster, one of two that together provide 80 percent of the thrust needed to propel the shuttle into orbit.
Between .836 seconds and 2.5 seconds into the flight, there were eight ''more distinctive puffs of increasingly blacker smoke," the photographic analysis showed.
"The black color and dense composition of the smoke puffs suggest that the grease, joint insulation and rubber O-rings in the joint seal were being burned and eroded by the hot propellant gases," the commission report concluded.
At 58.788 seconds after liftoff, the first "very small flame" was detected on image-enhanced film, and it appeared to originate "at or near the aft field joint" from which smoke had begun to spew just at liftoff, according to the report.
Almost immediately, at 59.262 seconds after liftoff, this initial flame grew into a continuous, well-defined plume. At about that instant, telemetry indicated pressure differences between the left and right solid rocket boosters, suggesting that chamber pressure was lower in the right booster and ''confirming the growing leak in the area of the field joint."
As the photo analysis showed, the plume of flame increased in size and was deflected rearward as the Challenger ascended at almost twice the speed of sound. This directed the flame onto the surface of the huge external fuel tank, with its volatile mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
"The first visual indication that swirling flame from the right SRB breached the external tank was at 64.660 seconds, when there was an abrupt change in the shape and color of the plume," the commission said. "This indicated that it was mixing with leaking hydrogen from the external tank."
Beginning at about 72 seconds after liftoff, the commission said, "a series of events occurred extremely rapidly that terminated the flight . . . The shuttle struggled futilely against the forces that were destroying it."
At 72.20 seconds, the lower strut connecting the right solid rocket booster to the external tank was severed or pulled away from the external tank.
At 73.124 seconds, the structure of the external tank's hydrogen tank gave way, releasing massive amounts of liquid hydrogen from the tank and creating a sudden forward thrust that pushed the hydrogen tank and the wildly rotating solid rocket booster upward into the intertank structure that contained the liquid oxygen.
"Within milliseconds there was a massive, almost explosive burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and the liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank," the report said.
It added: "The Challenger was totally enveloped in the explosive burn."
That rapid series of events, at an altitude of about 46,000 feet, proved to be catastrophic for the shuttle orbiter and its crew. "The orbiter, under severe aerodynamic loads, broke into several large sections which emerged from the fireball," the report said.
The commission reached no conclusion about how or when the seven astronauts died. But it said that examination of the recovered sections of the shuttle and its crew module had found "no evidence of an internal explosion, heat or fire damage."
The fractures found in the crew cabin, the commission said, "appeared to be the result of high forces generated by impact with the surface of the water." 