Anniversaries

There will be a lot of chat today about the 20th anniversary of the Chicago Bears win in the Superbowl. I'm sure many of our generation will make this their "Kennedy Moment" and recall exactly where they were for the game (Delta Upsilon fraternity house, Iowa City, IA).

But that's not the anniversary I want to reflect on today. Two days from now will mark 20 years since the space shuttle Challenger exploded claiming the lives of Commander Francis Scobee, Michael Smith , Judy Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.

That was my "Kennedy Moment." I was getting dressed for class when someone ran down the dorm hall and yelled, "The space shuttle blew up!" All we had was a black and white TV in the room. We turned it on and all we could see was a still frame of the fireball.

To say that we quickly forgot about the thrill of a football title would be an understatement.

We later studied the incident as part of my MBA program. We learned about the management screwups at Morton Thiokol that cost seven lives, billions of dollars, and an incalculable amount of corporate reputation.

If you recall the specifics, the Challenger launch was delayed several times, once because of accommodations to Vice President George Bush’s schedule, once because of a hatch problem, and once because of cold weather. Cold weather was known to cause problems with the O-ring seals on the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. These problems were noticed in a 1985 flight that was launched in extremely cold weather for Florida.

The 1986 Challenger flight saw temperatures as low as 8°F the night before the launch. The next morning, engineers at Thiokol were all against the launch, but management wanted a thumbs up. After ongoing debate, a senior executive at Thiokol, Jerald Mason, said that a management decision was required. Mason said to Bob Lund, VP of Engineering, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." The engineers changed their opinion from against a launch to launch recommended due to inconclusive data. This "engineering assessment" was given despite no engineers having part in writing the recommendation and with their refusal to sign it.

A few hours later, Challenger was destroyed.

A full accounting of the story can be found here.

In the 20 years since, the human flight space program has never fully recovered. The space station sits in need of a purpose. The shuttle fleet is grounded again having only 1 successful launch after Columbia was destroyed. Talk of manned missions back to the moon and to Mars is just so much pie in the sky. It's too bad, really.

There is something majestic and awe inspiring about manned space flight. People like Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, John Young, Jim Lovell, Deke Slayton and all the other astronauts of that era were truly heroes. They showed us we are only limited by our imagination.

They may not have brought a smile to your face the way William Perry did, but they were more deserving of our admiration.