🚀 go-pugleaf

 Any PEs involved in this group meeting?


--
Steve Alexanderson, P.E.
Newport Oregon

"I know engineers. They love to change things."  Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy

Gary Coffman wrote in article <33f4f50d.44444458@news.atl.bellsouth.net>...

>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:
>Destructive Testing Systems | We Break It  | ke4zv@bellsouth.net
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