"a Serious Deficiency"

By Ed Magnuson

He had once been viewed as being too gentle to compete in the rough-and-tumble world of Washington bureaucracy. But after chairing three days of public hearings last week on how NASA reached the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger on its doomed mission, former Secretary of State William Rogers was visibly--and vocally--angry.

Referring to the avalanche of documents concerning shuttle safety that the space agency passes from desk to desk, Rogers scolded some top NASA launch officials, "You eliminate the element of good judgment and common sense." Frustrated by conflicting accounts of positions taken at crucial preflight meetings, Rogers asked with cutting incredulity, "Does everybody know what everybody else is recommending?" He wondered aloud why those involved had not been required to take clear stands on life-and-death safety issues and had not had their positions recorded. And, Rogers concluded, he was certain the members of the presidential commission agreed with him that NASA's decision- making process "shows a serious deficiency" and was "clearly flawed."

The Rogers commission has another three months to complete its investigation into Challenger's explosion only 73 seconds after blasting off from the ice-encrusted Pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 28, killing all seven of its crew. But on one point the testimony already seemed conclusive: so many doubts had been expressed about the safety of the flight that Challenger should not have been launched on that frigid Florida morning. As one source privy to the commission's thinking said, "This was an absolutely preventable thing. This accident never should have happened. Never."

That conviction was based largely on testimony indicating how NASA officials had dealt with the preflight concerns expressed by two of the shuttle's prime contractors: Morton Thiokol, which makes the solid-fuel boosters that are the main focus of the search for a cause of the disaster, and Rockwell International, which manufactures the orbiter. Officials and engineers of both companies insisted that they had opposed the launch, at least initially, because of the cold weather and ice at the pad. But the NASA officials who heard the complaints contended that the objections had never been raised as forcefully as the contractors now claim and that in the end the disagreements had been resolved. Thus the NASA experts felt no need to relay the concerns to their superiors. That put NASA's highest officials in a position to testify that they were unaware of the opposition. And no NASA official conceded under questioning that given the facts available to him, his decision to launch might have been wrong.

After the enormity of the Challenger tragedy, it may have been tempting, even natural, for each participant to recall the discussions in the way that might put the best light on his performance and ease his conscience. George Hardy, a high engineering official at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the boosters were developed, last week accused Allan McDonald, the top Thiokol engineer present at Cape Canaveral for the launch, of having drawn on a "convenience of memory" in testifying about his preflight safety objections. Rogers protested that the comment implied McDonald might be lying and asked Hardy to withdraw it. He did.

The hearings did make it clear that there had long been doubts about the reliability of the seals at the three joints between the booster rocket's four main segments. Attention remained focused on the two large synthetic rubber O rings set in grooves and designed, like washers in a faucet, to keep the rocket's superhot gases from escaping out the joints.

As early as Dec. 17, 1982, the testimony showed, NASA had been concerned enough about the possibility that the O rings might fail during lift-off to designate them as "criticality 1" items, components whose failure would doom the mission. Earlier shuttle flights had indicated that the second ring might be unseated from its groove by the great pressures on the rocket casing during lift-off, and could not always be relied upon as a backup should the first ring fail. Lack of a reliable backup violated a longtime NASA principle. The space agency formally waived the redundancy requirement for these seals in March 1983 to permit flights to continue. Meantime, as many as 43 different solutions to the problem were being studied.

In July 1985 NASA Budget Analyst Richard Cook had warned in an internal memo that unless the O rings were improved, a "catastrophic" failure might follow. Three weeks ago, he revealed that during every shuttle launch, some engineers had "held their breath" in fear of an O-ring failure. Last week Engineer Roger Boisjoly, Thiokol's top expert on the rings, testified that he had sent a similar memo to his superiors only days after Cook sent his. On any one flight, his memo warned, it was "a jump ball" as to whether the seal would hold, and if it did not, "the result would be a catastrophe of the highest order--loss of human life." One month later, yet another Thiokol engineer, Arnold Thompson, urged his company to ask NASA to suspend all flights until the seal problem was fixed. Thiokol management apparently did not convey these warnings to NASA.

Last week's testimony also provided distressing new detail about the weather- related worries that developed as a cold front hit the Cape on Jan. 27. After hearing forecasts that the Florida temperature might fall to as low as 18 degrees F that night, Robert Ebeling, a Thiokol engineer at the company's plant in Brigham City, Utah, telephoned McDonald at the Cape about 4 p.m. He said that he and other engineers at the plant were worried about the seals. McDonald then got the latest prediction, about 22 degrees , and, finding this "very serious," called Robert Lund, the vice president for engineering at Thiokol, to urge a full-scale analysis to determine if the seals could perform safely at that temperature. It should be "an engineering decision," McDonald told Lund, "not a programmanagement decision."

McDonald and Judson Lovingood, deputy manager of the shuttle projects office at Marshall, set up a teleconference among engineers and managers at * the Cape, Huntsville and in Utah to discuss the O-ring problem. Before it began, Lovingood got the impression that Thiokol was concerned enough to seek a flight delay. He asked his boss, Stanley Reinartz, shuttle projects manager at Marshall who was then at the Cape, to tell Arnold Aldrich, the overall shuttle manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, who was also in Florida, that a flight delay was likely. But Reinartz decided to wait until he had "a full understanding of the situation" before informing Aldrich.

Back in Utah, preparations for the pivotal teleconference were rushed. Lund ordered all data collected on any correlation between temperature and the amount of erosion experienced in the O rings on previous flights. Boisjoly worried in particular about Shuttle Mission 51-C in January 1985, in which the seal temperature had been 53 degrees (although the air had warmed to 66 degrees by the time of launch). When the spent boosters were recovered from that flight, what Boisjoly described as black soot "just like coal" was found behind a primary ring in one booster, indicating that gases had blown past the first ring. Although erosion had also been found after flights in warmer temperatures, 51-C had been exposed to overnight lows in the 20s and had more extensive ring damage. Boisjoly knew that lower temperatures reduced the resiliency and hardness of the rings. At 29 degrees , the anticipated temperature of the O rings the next morning, he feared that getting the rings to seal gaps in the joints might be like "trying to shove a brick into a crack," although it should be like "a sponge."

When the all-important teleconference began at 8:45 p.m., Lawrence Mulloy, chief of the booster program at Marshall, had joined Reinartz and McDonald at the Cape end of the network. Lovingood and Hardy were at Huntsville. In Utah, Lund was joined by Joe Kilminster, vice president for booster programs; Jerald Mason, senior vice president, and Calvin Wiggins, vice president for space projects. A dozen Thiokol engineers in Utah were also participating. Boisjoly presented six charts that had been transmitted to the others and argued that "lower temperature was a factor" in O-ring performance. Lund, the highest engineering officer, said flatly that unless the temperature reached at least 53 degrees , "I don't want to fly."

Mulloy and Hardy led the NASA challenge to this conclusion. Hardy said that he was "appalled" by the reasoning behind the no-fly stance of Thiokol, $ while Mulloy insisted that there was no demonstrable link between temperature and O-ring erosion. He contended that despite NASA's placing the booster seals on the criticality-1 list because of a lack of redundancy, the backup ring would certainly seat in the critical early-ignition phase of the launch and provide a seal even if gases got by the first ring. Since NASA had not established a minimum launch temperature for the boosters, he and Hardy both complained that Thiokol was trying to change the flight criteria on the night before a scheduled mission. Said Mulloy: "You can't do that." In his testimony last week, he did not deny having said, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?" But he argued that his listeners had taken his highly publicized remark out of context.

After some two hours of debate, Kilminster, who had supported Thiokol's no- go position, asked for a five-minute recess to consider NASA's objections. The break stretched on for half an hour. Caucusing in Utah, the engineers remained unanimous against the launch. Nonetheless, Mason declared that "we have to make a management decision," then turned to Lund and asked him to 'take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat." In front of the surprised engineers, Mason polled only the management officials, getting Lund, Wiggins and Kilminster to join him in giving NASA a recommendation from Thiokol to launch.

When the teleconference resumed and Kilminster announced the startling turnabout, Marshall's shuttle manager Reinartz asked if anyone on the network had any comment on the decision. There was no response. Thiokol was now on record as no longer opposing the launch, and the telephone hookup was ended. Kilminster telefaxed a memo to the Cape and Huntsville formalizing the change.

Somewhat belatedly, McDonald pleaded with Mulloy to reconsider. "If anything happened to this launch," he said prophetically, "I sure wouldn't want to be the person that had to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why I launched."

Understandably, the Rogers commission wanted to know what had caused the switch at Thiokol. Testified Lund: "We got ourselves into the thought process that we were trying to find some way to prove to them it (the booster) wouldn't work. We couldn't prove absolutely that it wouldn't work." When Mason was asked whether telling Lund to put on his management hat did not amount to pressuring his subordinate to change his mind, he replied, "Well, I hope not, but it could be interpreted that way." Both Hardy and Mulloy insisted that they had exerted no pressure on Thiokol by their tough questioning of the engineers. They said that after Kilminster announced his company's flight go-ahead, they had no idea that the engineers had remained unanimously opposed to this position.

Reinartz testified that he had never told Aldrich, his launch-command superior, about the discussion with Thiokol or about that firm's original opposition to the flight. He argued that since the issue had been resolved, there was no need to do so. When Mulloy took the same position, a commissioner, Air Force Major General Donald Kutyna, observed bitingly, "If this was an airplane and I just had a fight with Boeing over whether the wing could fall off, I think I'd tell the pilot." Reinartz explained that he had informed his boss, William Lucas, director of the Marshall center, who had no direct launch authority. "If you want to report a fire," said Kutyna, "you don't go to the mayor."

Called to testify, Lucas ran into a buzz saw of objections from Rogers when he tried to argue that he had never considered the O-ring problem a flight- safety issue, even though its criticality classification meant that it clearly was. Pressed, he finally conceded, "If I had heard the alarms that have been expressed in this room this week before the flight, I certainly would have been concerned. Yes sir." Nonetheless he insisted later at a press conference, "I think it was a sound decision to launch."

The commissioners also zeroed in on the icy pad conditions that prompted Rockwell to oppose the launch. While the ice was apparently unrelated to the cause of the tragedy, the commissioners regarded NASA's reaction to that opposition as more evidence of the space agency's failure to heed warnings. Viewing the pad by television from his company's launch-support center in Downey, Calif., Rocco Petrone, president of Rockwell's space transportation and systems group, had been alarmed about the ice-encrusted gantry. He telephoned Robert Glaysher, a Rockwell vice president at the Cape, and told him that Rockwell could not recommend proceeding with the launch. Glaysher raised the issue at a 9 o'clock meeting the next morning attended by a score of ice experts and chaired by Aldrich. "Rockwell cannot assure it is safe to fly," he said. The company feared that ice might break off the gantry and damage the orbiter tiles.

The experts, who had studied this possibility, concluded that the ice did not pose a danger and Rockwell's position in effect was dismissed. But once again there had been an apparent misunderstanding about the degree of opposition to proceeding. Testified Aldrich: "A concern was voiced (by Rockwell) but they didn't say 'Don't launch.' " Rogers found this another "serious deficiency in the process."

Two major contractors had warned that Challenger should not fly that day. One, apparently under pressure from NASA's middle managers, had changed its mind. The other had not. But NASA's highest decision makers had either not heard about the contractors' fears or ignored them. So Challenger blasted into the Florida sky on its brief, one-way flight to oblivion.

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With reporting by Jay Branegan/ Washington and Jerry Hannifin/ Cape Canaveral