🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 15 Aug 1997 11:17:28 -0700, "Steve Alexanderson"
<no-spam-please-Salexanderson@Cencoast.com> wrote:
> NASA is federal agency. The feds claim exemption from state laws like
>engineering licensing. They even have positions called Professional Engineer
>that list no licensing requirement. Add federal exemption to the list of
>exemptions.  In any case, the management I was referring to was that the
>private company responsible for designing the seals. If memory serves,
>engineering recommended delay but management blocked the message from ever
>getting to NASA.

Your memory does not serve. The two site engineers expressed reservations
about launch site temperature in the "go" meeting with the NASA launch director.
At that point, Morton Thiokol management was conference called into the meeting.
The NASA launch director expressed strongly that he didn't want to "wait until
summer" to launch, and Thiokol management backed him. The two site engineers
then signed off on the launch.

The real problem here is that the site engineers didn't have hard test data to
back their feeling that launch temperature was too low. So this came down 
to a judgement call weighing budget and schedules against a "hunch", and 
NASA management and Thiokol management had more clout than the site 
engineers in this ultimately political decision.

The real failure here was a lack of realistic low temperature testing which
would have supplied the needed test data to show the hazard of launching 
at this low temperature. That too was ultimately a political decision (made
several years previously) based on budget and schedule considerations. 
Those things are outside the realm of engineering control and fall at the feet
of the Congress, the Administration, NASA top management, and Thiokol 
top management.

I think that most of us would consider the field joint a crappy design. And
the bandaids placed on it after Challenger still leave it a crappy design. That
too was a political decision. The impact on budget and schedules of a totally
new joint design was deemed unacceptable by those controlling the purse strings.
So Shuttle still flies on the edge of disaster. 

In fact it is worse than that. A superior booster design was available which
avoided the use of field joints altogether. But that was rejected because of 
the purely political pork barrelling involved in spreading Shuttle contracting
across the nation. Field joints were required to allow the boosters to be
shipped back and forth by rail between Utah and the Cape. The non-field 
joint design would have to have been built and refurbished where it could be
shipped in one piece to and from the Cape, IE by barge. But the Senator
from Mississippi was judged to already have more than his share of pork,
and the Senator from Utah got it instead. Thus we had Challenger.

Gary
Gary Coffman KE4ZV          | You Make It  | Email:
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