Could the Challenger Disaster Have Been Prevented?

The History Channel, original podcast. History this week, January 28, 1986. I'm Sally Helm. It's early morning in Central Florida, and it's freezing. In fact, it is below freezing, 18 degrees Fahrenheit, way colder than it normally gets here, even in January. Farmers are bundled up, standing out among their citrus trees, lighting small fires to keep the fruit warm. Because last year, during another free cold snap, the citrus crop was devastated. Oranges froze hard as baseballs. Farms went under, some citrus growers left town. The losses were a catastrophic $2.5 billion. People called that cold snap the freeze of the century. And now, one year later, another once in a hundred year event. Bad news for the orange growers. And not just for them. All the way over in Utah, a man named Roger Bojolet has just heard how cold it is in Florida. And he is horrified. Bojolet is a rocket engineer for an aerospace company called Morton Thia Call. And this cold snap, this is his worst nightmare. Because tomorrow, Morton Thia Call's biggest client, NASA, is supposed to launch a space shuttle, a very high profile shuttle with seven people on board. And Bojolet knows that this cold could make that very, very dangerous. Today, the Challenger disaster, a tragedy that would claim seven lives on national television and change space exploration forever. What went wrong? And if engineers knew what could happen, why wasn't it avoided? What if everything you learn in history class was only half the story? I'm Dr. Grini Bott, host of Hidden History. Every Monday, I go where history gets mysterious. Banished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. On Hidden History, I treat these moments like open case files, not miss, not superstition, just incomplete explanations, waiting for a closer look. Listen to and follow Hidden History, available now wherever you get your podcasts. We're hearing this story from journalist Adam Hagen-Batham, who wrote a book about Challenger. And like a lot of people who write about space, he was obsessed as a kid, watched his first live launch in 1981, and that was an important one. It was the first launch of NASA's space shuttle program. - Six, five, four, we've gone from main engine start, we have eight engines. It was a spacecraft that could take off from Cape Canaveral and then go into space and then come back and land on a runway, you know, just like the spacecraft in 2001, a space Odyssey, which was totally unlike what had ever been done before. - America's first space shuttle, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. - Yep, this is the Columbia. It's a reusable manned spacecraft. The shuttle program is one of NASA's biggest initiatives since the moon landing. - This idea that they would have a shuttle, a space truck, they would be able to go into space and back, you know, on a sort of almost routine schedule. And the selling point, the step forward that that represented was that it would make space travel routine. - A space truck, this NASA promised, would be more than a high-minded exploration. It would be practical, useful. And perhaps most importantly, commercially viable. - But you're gonna be able to take, you know, lots more people into space and further down the road, you're gonna be able to take ordinary people into space. And so that was always kind of a part of the PR idea behind the space shuttle. - Congress goes for it. And on April 12, 1981, the world's first space shuttle takes off. Millions of people watch it on television, including Adam Higginbatham. But way bigger than the launch is the return. 54 and a half hours later. This is the real test. Will the spacecraft come back intact? Is it really reusable? People flock from all over to witness this moment, so many that it creates a six-mile long traffic jam. As the shuttle approaches, the crowd falls still. And then the craft touches down, rolling onto the tarmac like an airplane would. (clapping) - Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful, beautiful. - The astronauts step off the shuttle, giddy and smiling. - The Columbia represents an achievement in aerospace technology and development never before realized in the history of manned space flight. - The Columbia launch isn't just a technical success for NASA. It's also a PR coup. People are invested in what NASA is doing, they care. And as NASA keeps launching, the public keeps watching. - A revolutionary new era in space transportation has just begun. Routine access to space. Welcome to the future. - Over the next few years, the space shuttle program hits its stride. NASA racks up a series of firsts, the first African-American in space, Guy in Blueford. The first American woman in space, a famous Sally, Sally Ride. NASA even had a sort of space cowboy thing going on for a while. - They did these amazing missions where they would fly into space and just kind of recover errand satellites, like kind of roping a steer in space and then bringing it back to Earth to get it fixed. Which of the time just seemed incredible. These launches become cultural touchstones. Their broadcast live on television, the astronauts become bona fide celebrities. And all of these firsts, they happen aboard one shuttle, Challenger. But any TV producer will tell you, it's hard to keep America's attention for long. - Well, it's also so frequent that the public had just got bored with it. To the extent that the major networks no longer carry in each launch live. - This puts NASA in a bind. Their goal was to make space travel routine, but routine space travel gets boring. Like almost no one goes to watch airplanes take off. And the stakes are high because NASA's funding, in some ways, depends on the public support. - They really needed to command public attention in order to get congressional support, in order to keep funding flowing. They needed to recapture the public's imagination. So the idea of flowing a civilian into space really can do the fore as a way of getting good publicity. - A civilian in space, an ordinary person. But who? - They, you know, they considered all sorts of options. - Among the contenders, comedians, boy scouts, my favorite, big bird. Yes, that big bird, favorite for a lot of people. And the only reason as far as I can gather this didn't actually happen is because the nature of the costume made it challenging to make it work in zero gravity. - In the end, the committee lands on a different idea, a teacher. - A good teacher is often a natural communicator would be a good advocate, you know, NASA's role in education expanding the boundaries of science. - It makes sense. And on August 27th, 1984, President Ronald Reagan announces the teacher in space project and encourages teachers across the country to apply. It's a media bananza, more than 11,000 teachers throw their hats in the ring. And on July 19th, 1985, Vice President George H. W. Bush announces the winner. - Well, we're here today to announce the first private citizen passenger in the history of spaceflight. - He stands in front of a podium, wearing glasses, a tan suit, and a yellow polka dot tie. It's not as funky as it sounds. To his left is a group of teachers, the competition's 10 finalists. They look a little nervous. - And the winner, the teacher who will be going into space, Christa McCalliff, where has said you. [LAUGHTER] McCalliff is standing right next to Bush. She has curly brown hair, bangs, big smile. But when she's-- steps up to the podium, she's choking back tears. It's not often that a teacher visit a loss of a word. I know my students wouldn't think so. And the people watching at home, they love her. So many people around the country identified with her because they could put themselves in her place. She was the every man astronaut. It's of course tragic to think about this now, this moment of excitement and hope. But it's important context to understand why and how things would eventually go so wrong. Because in public, in front of the media cameras, everything is going incredibly well for NASA. There are heartwarming stories about McCallis husband and her children in her hometown of Concord, New Hampshire. The crew she'll be flying with, six other astronauts, their smart, charismatic, and the most diverse crew that NASA has ever flown. It really embodied the notion of this as the kind of best and the brightest of American society. The mission kind of feels like something out of Star Trek. There are even plans from McCallis to teach live lessons to her New Hampshire students from the space. She even makes an appearance on the tonight show starring Johnny Carson. And just like that, NASA is back in prime time. But behind the scenes, well out of the public eye, the shuttle program is experiencing problems, dangerous problems. Building a rocket is very hard. It is the famously complicated rocket science. And building a reusable rocket is even harder. In his book, Higgand Batham calls the Space Shuttles, these reusable space trucks, the most complicated machine in history up to that point. I started talking to engineers who worked on both the Apollo program and the shuttle program. And I would reiterate this, raised to them, you know, the most complicated machine in history. And I'm like, was that really true? They would always go absolutely it was true, it was orders of magnitude harder. Launching the most complicated machine in history into space with people on board, that is always going to be risky. Almost everyone involved in the space shuttle program was aware of the fact that there were thousands of things that could go wrong with this extremely dangerous system. And NASA had experienced disasters before. The worst was the Apollo 1 disaster in 1967. A fire broke out on board the spacecraft during a pre-flight test, and horribly three astronauts on board were killed. But by the 1980s, all of the successful shuttle missions might have made those disasters seem like the distant past. There is this gulf between the nature of manned spaceflight was understood by the paperwork to NASA and the way that it was presented to the public. In other words, space travel is starting to look routine, which had been the goal. And so some people are starting to imagine that riding aboard a spacecraft is about to save us stepping onto an airplane, which it certainly is not. And from the beginning, things do go wrong with the space shuttles. Not so wrong that it derails the missions, but notably there is an issue with the joints for the solid rocket boosters. Okay, so the boosters are these massive engines that attach to the shuttle. They are huge, 12 feet across, almost 150 feet tall, so they can't be built in one piece. They have to be put together in sections. And these sections are held together by joints, which are sealed by wide, black rubber discs called O-rings. They discover in testing almost immediately that the joints between these sections of the solid rocket boosters don't work as they intended them to. The extreme heat of the rocket exhaust damages the O-rings. They burn and show signs of deterioration, which, as you can imagine, is not ideal. But they do kind of work okay. They don't really leak that badly all the time. And so the engineers decide, well, yeah, they don't work quite as we imagine that they would, but they do work well enough for us to think this is… Acceptable Risk. Acceptable Risk. That is not just a euphemism. Like even though NASA is pulling off launch after launch successfully, this is still experimental technology. The guy who ran the Marshall Space Flight Center, he said that the only way to guarantee safety is not to leave the launch pad. That's true. If you're running an experimental program, then you can't wait around until you know that everything works 100% perfectly, because you'd never get off the ground. But at the same time, Congress is putting more and more pressure on the shuttle program to become more financially viable. After all, NASA had promised them a space truck, something that would help the program pay for itself. And that hasn't happened yet. Congress isn't happy. So at that point, then they started saying, "Oh, well, we can maybe lease one out to other companies that might want to use it for commercial purposes in space." And they ended up in a situation where at one point there was serious consideration of selling one of the already constructed shuttles to federal express, to operate as entirely privately owned enterprise. That doesn't happen. Instead, NASA decides to launch more frequently. The thought is, the more they launch, the more Congress will feel as if they're delivering on this space truck promise. And so maybe commercial money is just around the corner. In 1985, NASA plans to launch nine times, a record. But as the frequency of launches increases, the program begins to buckle under the strain. January 1985. The first launch in that year of many launches. Roger Bogele walks into the hangar at Cape Canaveral. It's chilly outside, but it could be worse. Just a few days ago, it was freezing, historically cold, in fact. A meteorological anomaly. Bogele cuts an imposing figure. Tall, bulky, bald, a brow that seems permanently furrowed. He's an engineer for Morton Thiacal, a contractor who manufactures parts of NASA's rockets. He usually works in Utah, where he's developed a bit of a reputation for budding heads with management, though the other engineers seem to love him. Today, he's here to inspect the solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle discoveries recent launch. Afterwards, the boosters had been tracked by radar, retrieved from the ocean, lifted by cranes onto custom dollies, and moved to this hangar, where they're finally ready for his inspection. Roger Bogele absolutely freaked out. Bogele finds a major problem with the O-rings. Those seals that are supposed to keep the solid rocket boosters together and prevent hot gas from leaking out. They'd suffered some damage on previous launches, but this time was different. At least one of the O-rings had sustained so much damage that had almost burned through, and that a leak had almost formed from inside the combustion chamber of the rocket to the outside of the rocket, at which point it would have been uncontrollable and would have just cut through the casing of the rocket, like a hot knife through butter. If this O-ring had failed, the rocket would have exploded. In fact, Bogele is shocked that it didn't. The discovery had five astronauts on board, and Bogele knows that they had just very narrowly escaped death. But not just that. He knows why this happened. He almost immediately made a connection between the extreme cold weather that January day when it launched and the nature of the leak. The cold had made the O-rings brittle, more susceptible to damage, more likely to allow a leak. Bogele takes this revelation to management. But he couldn't really convince anyone that this was a problem that was necessarily going to recur. Because Florida never gets this cold. His supervisors from the Marshall Space Fight Center explicitly said to him, "You know, just never going to happen again for another hundred years, and by the time this kind of weather happens again, this will be fixed, and in the meantime to keep launching." And so they do. It was kind of incredible that they managed to fly as frequently as they did in 1985. Nine times. They do it. And while NASA keeps launching, Morton Thiokol works on the O-ring problem. They create a task force. But it becomes clear, management and engineers have different takes on what needs to happen. The O-ring, if she was tricky, solving it, that would require a massive years-long redesign. If Morton Thiokol were to insist on a fix, would NASA really wait around? Pause these launches for years while these rubberized rings get redesigned. Would they keep using Morton Thia call as a contractor? The engineers are freaked out. One working on the project even sends a memo to management with the subject line "help" in all caps with an exclamation point, trying to draw attention to the dangers of the o-ring issue. And you know, people might be thinking, "Well, the really big issue only comes up during extreme cold, freak weather events." And how likely is it really that a once-in-a-hundred-year event will happen twice. January 28, 1986. Today, Christmastolif is supposed to become the first private citizen in space. Theoretically. But the launch has already been delayed twice. The previous shuttle launch, another Columbia mission, ended up delayed five times. NASA has been made to look foolish and sneered out on the nightly news. So this launch and the previous one have already been huge in barisements. Things aren't looking good today either. It's cold out. Freeze it. For the second year in a row. In fact, the launch tower is covered in foot and a half long icicles. So when McCall and the other astronauts gather over a stake in eggs breakfast, wearing white polos posing for a second round of pre-launch photos, they're pretty certain there's no way we're going to launch today. There's all sorts of reasons that the cold seems to make it impossible to launch and that the astronauts that convince the launch won't go ahead. Even as they go out to the launch pad, they're sure that the launch would just be scrubbed because of the temperatures. Then the knowns to the astronauts. Some of NASA's leadership had spent the night in a trailer near the launch site on a conference call discussing this very issue. The call was initiated by Morton Fyacall, NASA's Utah contractor. And Roger Bogele wants to raise the alarm. He's seen the weather report and he's seen what extreme cold did to the O-rings from discovery. He says it is not safe to launch. He convinces all of the people at his end in Utah to oppose the launch and decide that the launch should be delayed. They tell NASA do not launch Challenger. Morton Fyacall has never recommended delaying a launch in this way before. It's a very high stakes decision. They know that NASA is already feeling some pressure about the recent delays. So the idea that they're going to say, "Actually, you know what? There's something else wrong with it." We recommend delaying. Morton Fyacall know that that's really not going to go down well. And it doesn't. Especially with Larry Maloy. Maloy is NASA management middle-aged. Thick, graying hair, part of the side. All is photographed wearing a suit. He was the person to whom all of the people at Morton Fyacall ultimately answered. He was the customer. And he was an extremely capable engineer, but he could be overbearing. From a conference room in Utah, Roger Bogele and his colleague Ernie Thompson begin to lay out their case. It's not safe to launch in whether this cold. The O-rings could fail. Larry Maloy is not happy. I mean, he says, "My god, Thiacol, when do you expect me to launch next April?" Morton Fyacall continues to make their case for delaying the launch, and Maloy continues to push back. And what Larry Maloy began doing in that meeting ultimately was asking them to prove that it wasn't safe to fly. And that was a complete reversal of the usual emphasis in a flight readiness meeting. Generally, contractors have to prove it is safe to fly. And now, NASA wants Morton Fyacall to prove the opposite, like show us hard proof we shouldn't go ahead. According to Higginbotham, to the engineers in the room, it really seems like NASA wants to launch. But to make the decision properly, they need Morton Fyacall's okay. The Morton Fyacall team takes that in, and they ask for a five-minute break. They sit around in the conference room, and almost immediately the most senior man in the room says that he wants to fly. The engineers are excluded from the decision, but the managers in the room have to be unanimous. That senior manager says he'll do it, so does the second. But one is holding out. Bob Lund, who was Morton Fyacall's head of engineering for the entire division, the most senior engineer of the company really didn't want a reverse decision. And there is this very dramatic moment where Lund sits there having heard the two other senior managers in the room say, "Oh yeah, well, I'm okay to fly." And he just can't bring himself to do it because he knows what the risks are, and he believes the data. But everyone in this room is under pressure to launch. From NASA, from the media, from the public, from Congress, jobs are at stake. Reputations. Funding. And maybe the O-rings will hold? And he just sits there and eventually puts up his hands and says, "Okay, I agree. Let's fire." Morton Fyacall gives NASA the okay. And that's the moment at which there's no turning back, because everything that happens after that leads directly to the catastrophe. The next morning, McCalliff and the rest of the crew board Challenger, the hatch snaps shut behind them. The ground controller is breaking to applause. A crowd gathers three miles from the launch site. Christa McCall's parents and sister are among them. 11.34 a.m. T-minus four minutes. The countdown starts. Back in Utah, Bojolay is taking the launch on TV in a conference room at Morton Fyacall. He turns to his colleague and says, "I don't want to watch." The rocket boosters fire and the shuttle takes off. And lift off. Lift off of the 25th space shuttle mission and it is clear the talent. When you watch the footage of the launch shot from the perspective of people watching it on the ground, the civilians watching who've come to see the teacher in space launch, they watch the first 60 seconds of the flight. You know, they're woping and they're excited and they're cheering and they're clapping and they're holding their cameras and they're not getting us up to the sky to watch. Challenge it kind of streak away from the earth. In Utah, Bojolay breathes a sigh at front leaf. Roger Bojolay and the other engineers were convinced that if a failure of the owing took place, it would lead to an instantaneous explosion on the launch pad. And so literally one turn to the other, as the shuttle left the launch pad and said, "We just dodged a bullet and they thought that they'd managed to beat the odds again." But 73 seconds into the flight. The fireball blooms around the shuttle and then quite quickly obscures where the shuttle used to be. But people on the ground are still cheering. There's clapping. A lot of people think that this is an ordinary part of a shuttle launch. They know that the solid rockets are supposed to break away and fall away at a certain juncture in the launch. And that's what happens. The rockets do break away. But they start corkscuring off in crazy directions and only gradually does realization begin to settle over the crowd that something terrible has happened. Slowly the crowd falls quiet. Then people start crying, holding each other. We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. Flight director confirms that. We are looking back. Back in Utah, Bojolay leaves the room in tears. And it's only the beginning of the grieving process. For the engineers, the families, everyone close to the astronauts. You destroyed their lives. I mean, they never got over it. The aftermath is grim. The nation is shocked and heartbroken. And the fact that it happened live on television in front of 1.5 million school children, meant that the nation was united in grief in a way that it probably hadn't been since the assassination of Kennedy. That evening, President Reagan postpones his scheduled state of the union to address the disaster. The space shuttle challenger honored us for the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped to the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. In the aftermath of the disaster, the public turns on NASA. They want to know what just happened and why. Within a week, Reagan launches a commission to investigate. Roger Bogele is among the people who testify, so is Larry Malloy. The highlights feature heavily on the nightly news. After three months, the commission reveals their findings. The challenger exploded because of the failure of the O-rings, which was related to the cold temperatures. The tragedy could have been prevented by the people in that room the night before. You know, they were not moustache twirling villains. They were people who were arrogant, certainly, and thought that they knew better. You know, and they thought they were making the right decision and they were wrong. But there were hundreds of engineers like Bogele working on this program, and hundreds of decisions that were made like Larry Malloy's decisions that ultimately didn't lead to a catastrophe that we just don't know about. The challenger explosion, of course, has a profound effect on NASA. It becomes a generation-defining tragedy, one that can never be erased. This idea of it being this kind of posse of egghead geniuses with slide rules who can achieve the impossible on a regular basis, and that it's almost infallible agency, the public never see NASA in the same way again. And the organization itself changes too. There is a huge overhaul of all of the operations that go into launching a space shuttle to the point where people begin to fear that it's become an even more bureaucratic and risk-averse agency. And then that perhaps they're not prepared to take risks that are necessary to take in expanding the bounds of human knowledge. But there were numerous engineering and bureaucratic changes that were adopted. And that led to years and years of safe shuttle launches until 2003. One of the problems that eventually developed was a lot of the people who were involved and witnessed the accident. In those years after it happened, they left NASA or they retired. And so that institutional memory of what kind of catastrophe that wasn't how it happened, that began to ebb-a-way. In Columbia Houston, we see your prior pressure messages and we didn't have to contact them. On February 1, 2003, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated when it re-entered the atmosphere. The seven astronauts on board were all killed. Deaths, many think, were preventable. You know, the inquiry afterwards found that it happened for almost exactly the same bureaucratic and administrative decision-making reasons that challenged your happen. No matter what NASA does, there will always be hard decisions to make when it comes to acceptable risk. How do they measure acceptable risk when weighing it against the progress of humankind? That's why it's so important to learn from the decisions of the past that went tragically wrong. Hick and bottom pointed us to a very recent case where NASA has been trying to analyze acceptable risk, the Boeing Starliner launch. Two astronauts rode the craft to the International Space Station and after that launch took place, engineers found some anomalies in the thruster system. And that they weren't happy with it and they thought that might represent a danger on return to Earth. Now, under exactly those circumstances, it's very easy to see that if that had happened in 1986, they would have looked at the data and they would have said, "You know what? We realize there's a problem here, but we think we're okay." And indeed, the Boeing did say that this time around. Boeing wanted to push forward, but NASA made the cautious decision. NASA said, "You know what? I don't think so. We're going to keep them up there until we know it's safe to return." And in fact, at happened 40 years ago, it would have gone very differently, I think. And the two astronauts may have been returned, but they might not have been. Instead, as I record these words, there are two astronauts floating around in the International Space Station, waiting until a different, safer capsule is available to take them home. Just to be safe. Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Backpocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things history this week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at [email protected]. Special thanks to our guest, Adam Higgand-Batham, author of Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dixteen. It was also produced by Catherine Isaac and by me, Sally Helm. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producers are Ben Dixteen and David Weisbord. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week.