Challenger: A Rush To Launch

many years ago great british explorer george mallory who was to die on mount everest was asked why did he want to climb it he said because it is there well space is there and we're going to climb it liftoff we have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour look up and apollo 11. we ask god's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked that's one small step for man challenger go and throttle up obviously a major malfunction 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 the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of god we were able to determine exactly what happened we know precisely how this accident occurred the stars in the sky were like the stars in his eyes twinkling as he told me what it was like to fly in space it's a great pleasure for us to be here we expect weather like this on sunday when we launch and you all do the best to keep it that way if you would well i am so excited to be here i don't think any teacher has ever been more ready to have two lessons in my life and here comes just like true now big smiles today well nasa's space shuttle program actually anticipated flying 60 flights every year when it first was conceived after the apollo program was over and which meant you know you can fly one of these more than every week of the year and because it was supposed to be so reusable for many flights they tried to recover as much of the hardware for reuse which included the whole orbiter obviously and the only thing was expended really was the big external tank sawed rocket boosters retrieved out of the ocean under parachutes and brought back to refurbish and reload and the problem they quickly ran into is they found that it was far more difficult to refurbish all this hardware and get it back online it became quite evident that that kind of a flight rate wasn't really possible at all but that was the conception of the shuttle in the first place was a real freight train to space i remember when the space shuttle program was announced and i thought that's kind of neat because i thought having a reusable vehicle would be the way to go i realize now that that's probably a mistake the shuttle was tremendously complicated riding on a rocket's not a real smart thing to do the fact is it's it's fraught with with risk and especially with a complicated vehicle like the shuttle i remember on my first flight back in 1983 at two minutes the solid rocket boosters have expended their fuel and they're jettisoned but i remember distinctly thinking ah my chances of surviving just went way up because it's true i we all knew that solid rockets are more dangerous inherently than liquid fuel rockets there are two major issues in the solid rocket boosters from returned hardware one was the excessive erosion we'd seen in some of the nozzles and also some erosion on the o-rings both in the field joints and in the nozzle joint on the boosters the o-rings had redundancy there was a two o-rings in the system one a primary and the other secondary and that's one of the conditions you try to create for a manned space flight is have redundancy wherever you can unfortunately in solid rocket boosters there's very few places you can do that allison onozuka who had flown the shuttle in january of 85 one year before challenger when we pulled those boosters back we noticed on one joint on each booster we had trapped soot between the two o-rings heavy thick black soot the primary o-ring was had some erosion the secondary didn't have any but it said the primary owning had lost its seal and we couldn't figure out why that occurred on that particular flight we went back through all the records and the tolerances and all on the design and finally concluded that happened because of the cold temperature at that time that was the coldest launch the shuttle had experienced which is about 53 degrees fahrenheit i was amazed that the astronauts including ellison himself and the others weren't aware of these in-flight anomalies he was never told about the condition of the boosters in his case and and none of the astronauts were my second flight was in april and it was april of 1985 and i was the flight engineer which was my sts-51 flight there were near failures in the nozzle in the o-rings in our flight on our vehicle so apparently to my great surprise we came close to being the challenger accident the big concern finally came about when we noticed in taking off the nozzle which is the back end of the booster that has also two o-rings that the primary o-ring was totally eroded through in three different locations and that created a real concern about the safety of flight from o-rings and he got so exasperated i think at one point he declared he said what do you want me to do thy call wait till spring well he probably should have waited i'm one of the three people on board who's who's and it'll be my first time to fly krista mcauliffe and greg jarvis will all it'll also be their first time and we're just all looking forward to getting on over and getting the secret handshake we loved every moment of that training period and opportunities to get to know each other all the the training that we did emergency training for the orbiter very very similar to the training that air crews do in the navy in the air force and marine corps training for water survival training training for uh you know survival out in the woods if you had to bail out or whatever we had a mock-up in houston where if the orbiter were to crash land or go off the runway and you had to get out somewhere we practiced water survival training uh such that if we did have to bail out over the ocean you know we were able to get into our rafts and our suits and everything and be comfortable christian mcauliffe became a great friend of mine we gathered frequently in my home there was a tremendous amount of attention my goodness she was representing every civilian in the world on this wonderful opportunity to fly in space and she was so precious clever um she became everyone's friend next door that anticipation of coming to the cape prior to a launch into space this was it was really neat it was like hey this is really going to happen this is it and seeing the vehicle on the pad and knowing that you had that awesome team pulling this all together to uh to help that's pretty cool you know the night before launch it's yeah there's one it's anticipation it's okay i gotta get some rest i got a busy day tomorrow you know it's it's special it's a and i know that's what they were thinking they were they were looking forward with the great anticipation to the launch and then we have commander dick scobee sitting beside pilot mike smith in front of the traditional cake featuring halley's comet and an apple for the teacher well on january uh 27 we had attempted launch and and it got scrubbed where i went over to my friend's house a fellow named carver kennedy he was the vice president of our space services he did the actually stacking of the boosters in the tank and the vehicle assembly building and i was there about an hour and i got a phone call from one of the people that worked for me and they said al you know we just heard that uh some meteorologist in orlando was saying that these strong ground winds we saw that right behind them is a cold front heading towards florida and it may be as cold as 18 degrees fahrenheit by tomorrow morning at the opening of the launch window i said good grief i'm i'm really worried that our o-ring seals and these fuel joints will operate properly those kind of temperatures and he says yeah we are too and our engineers wanted me to call you to see if you can get from nasa an actual hour-by-hour forecast to the temperature at the launch site i said fine i will get that for you i want you to get all the engineers together to put together a presentation on what we know and don't know about the impact of these temperatures on this field joint what is the lowest temperature it's safe to launch and i want that done i will set up a meeting with the nasa management here at the cape i will plug have them plug in their engineering people at the marshall space flight center in huntsville on this three-way teleconference with our engineers back in utah and i'll set that up for this evening the conference call started a little after eight o'clock that evening and the engineers did exactly what i asked them to do and went through their charts raja beaujolais was one of the major ones barney thompson and they presented all what they knew and didn't know and when they got all done the vice president engineering came on a fellow by the name of mr bob lund that i had requested and he said based on what his engineers had presented that he would not recommend launching below 53 degrees fahrenheit well this was the first time that morton thiacol first of all ever made any recommendation not to launch in fact as far as i know it's the first time any contractor in the whole shuttle program ever made a recommendation not to launch i was shocked at the response from nasa and what surprised me is they started questioning the basis for that recommendation and said that they didn't feel that we had substantiated the need to placard the shuttle to that temperature limit and furthermore as far as they're concerned they don't think the temperature has necessarily do with it and that's when roger beaujolais got very vocal about as far as he was concerned if you look at those it's the influence of temperature i was really surprised that mr larry malloy who was the head of the solid rocket boosters said well then facto when the hell you want me launch next april when he said that i thought that was very intimidating to me and everyone else that it was clear they didn't accept what we had just said and then he said you know the eve of a launch is a hell of a time to be changing the launch commit criteria so then he asked his engineering guy george hardy at marshall what his position was and he basically said that he was appalled at the recommendation we made based on the information we had but he wouldn't go against the contractor's recommendation after he had made that comment mr larry malloy then asked my boss the vice president of pace booster programs mr joe kilminster he said joe what's your position and his position was that i can't go against our engineering's recommendation but that he thinks that he would like to have some time to go off the net to make sure that we had presented everything we have to make sure that we have no further information to make a judgment on because there was an implication that maybe we hadn't presented everything and frankly when that happened i thought sure yeah they're going to do the best they can and try to analyze what is the lowest temperature we can maybe it's not 53 but it's clearly probably not going to be 20. well what i found out later what happened back in the conference call engineers got put into a position to prove that it would fail at the expected temperatures now that's a totally different question than prove that it's safe they could not prove that it would fail that's the first problem but the major problem was that the general manager of martin thaico fellow named jerry mason who i didn't even know was in this meeting at all got up and said you know he thought nasa had some good points and that he said you know am i the only one here that thinks it's okay to go ahead with the launch plan well that was an intimidating statement for him for him to make because everybody became silent when he made that statement and if the only two people that weren't were the ones who were most knowledgeable in the first place roger beaujolais and arne thompson arne thompson went back there and said hey here's why we shouldn't change our recommendation and roger went back with the two photos and showed them between the cold and hot here's we're going in the direction of this one it's going to get worse we don't know where the cliff is but there's one out there someplace and and they said well that's no new information you know go sit down at the cape i didn't realize that was happening but when they didn't finally come back on was my boss joe and killman stricken on and said they reassessed all the data and they have concluded that it's okay to proceed on with the launch as planned no specific temperature and i was kind of taken aback by that because i didn't hear him present anything that knew information that would change the original recommendation but that's what he said and then george hardy at huntsville said well we need to have that recommendation put in writing and signed by a responsible thigh call official and i knew who that responsible thigh call official was that was me that was my job that's why i was at the cape i did the smartest thing i ever did in my lifetime i refused to sign the recommendation i just didn't feel comfortable with it and because of that my boss had to sign it and fax it down to me well i made a couple of very prophetic statements that night when i was waiting for this fax to come that was signed by my boss authorizing to proceed with the launch i was very upset and i told nasa that i don't know who made this recommendation i really don't care if it's the ceo but you can't accept it so you can't accept it because you know and i know you're asking us to fly those solid rocket boosters outside of what they were qualified to fly in that's a violation of protocol you can't do that i sure hope nothing happens tomorrow but if it does i'm not going to be the person to stand before a board of inquiry and tell them that i gave you my approval to launch my rocket boosters an environment that they were never qualified to fly in and that ended the conversation go at throttle up so i think what most people didn't understand was that how big a plate nasa had at the time looking at a more macro scale they had suffered the prior launch had more delays than any launch prior in history the one that bill congressman bill nelson was on it had me lay some like seven times they got chastised by the press because the prior launch was delayed so many times the orlando sentinel had an article there saying you know nasa claims they're going to be launching two of these a month in the next couple of years and they couldn't even launch one in a month that was already ready to go declared ready to go which was true so they had to prove that they were capable of doing that it's it's not often that a teacher is at a loss for words i know my students wouldn't think so i think on nasa's association with the teacher in space on this launch and from the pr given to that astronaut krista mcauliffe it played a role from two points one is that it was the first ordinary citizen that created a group of people watching this launch far greater than they'd seen in for a long time because it became quite routine i don't think any teacher has ever been more ready to have two lessons in my life i've been preparing these in september and i just hope everybody tunes in on day four now to watch the teacher teaching from space her lesson plan was to provide a lesson to all these children in the schools on the fourth day of the mission tuesday wednesday thursday friday 20th january was on tuesday friday would have been the day that she would be giving this lesson plan to all these children in the schools if it got delayed one more day that would have pushed it to saturday how many kids are in school on saturday there they are the crew of mission 51l the next morning when he called to say we're going to fly and i said oh really last night you said you wouldn't be flying because of the weather and so forth and he said well they've decided we will and i said well i i told all our guests to go on home that you wouldn't be flying he said yes and i love you this is shuttle launch control at t minus two minutes twenty i mean two hours twenty eight minutes and counting here comes the 51 hour flight crew boarding the elevator for this thing here comes the flight through now all of the challenger seven families were together at kennedy space center we were on the top of a building administration building the countdown was a little was tense as as it should be and i was standing next to steve mcauliffe explaining to him because he was the had the least amount of information about launching and what happens with a launch we have main engine start four three two one and liftoff liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower we we watched it and and cheered it was like we were all on top of the world after it launched it's a beautiful beautiful cold winter morning the ground shook the fire crackled you know it was tremendous and and we were just all shouting the top of the world you know can you imagine um greatest joy for that our loved ones aboard the crew throttling up three inches now 104 challenger go with throttle up we were both angry we were both angry to know that it could have been prevented it was a sad day when we learned could have been prevented engine's throttling up three inches now 104 percent challenger go and throttle up one minute 15 seconds velocity 2900 feet per second altitude nine nautical miles downrange distance seven dog flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation obviously a major malfunction then i saw those uh solid rocket boosters start veering off in their own direction kind of spiraling out of um a trajectory that that was so uncommon i i was concerned about that and that's when one of the fellow astronauts said we should all go downstairs we have no downlink this is mission control houston we have no additional word at this time flight photo go ahead rso reports vehicle exploded copy fido can we get any reports from recovery forces standby reports from the flight dynamics officer indicate that the vehicle apparently exploded and that impact in the water at a point approximately 28.64 degrees north 80 degrees west we are awaiting a verification from as to the location of the recovery forces in the field to see what may be possible at this point yes sir dod lso reports that all soft forces have been scrambled and they are on their way okay all operators watch your data carefully okay everybody stay off the telephones make sure you maintain all your data start pulling it together when they transported us from this administrative building over to the crew quarters where we had visited so many times i saw on the street where people were weeping they were at their steering wheels weeping or out with their head on the fender or on people embracing on the street just cars stopped on the street and i knew it was it was really really serious and you've gone from this most exciting moment in your life to this terror and with sheer wrong you know numbness it's shock it is totally shock late this afternoon the space agency officially confirmed what had been frighteningly apparent from the beginning that no one had survived good evening shortly after the accident at first it was just no that didn't happen when they came and told us and of course we stopped and it well the crew's okay you know we it was very difficult to accept that we actually lost the vehicle and the crew when the shuttle was first launched i believed great sigh of relief when i saw it clear the tower and i was absolutely stunned like everybody else was when i saw this whole thing explode at 73 seconds i couldn't believe that the only thing i could still see flying were the two solid rocket boosters everything else had totally disappeared in this big explosive cloud and i could hear people behind me actually sobbing i kept looking at the screen and had my headset on and all i could hear was rtls rtls rtls known as means we turned to launch site we turned a launch site to the orbiter and obviously nothing came back the head of the mission management team said that they're phrasing everything on the screen and for nobody to write down what's on that screen whatever data whatever's there the doors were immediately locked the phones were all disconnected so nobody could make any telephone calls and that all of the data was going to be basically treated as secret and that nobody was allowed to leave the complex to even go to the bathroom my feeling at that time was that the only thing that didn't cause this accident was the solid rocket boosters and it wasn't until i went to marshall the next day that i found out differently a large-scale search effort was initiated to recover the space shuttle debris 22 ships six underwater search vessels and 33 aircraft participated in the operation the pieces recovered initially were those found floating on the surface the submarine fleet was used to locate and inspect underwater debris objects identified as being important to the investigation were retrieved fifty percent of the entire vehicle was recovered in the effort what we were import in mayport i was called to the bridge and by the time i got to the bridge i could see the contrails of the launch and the explosion i knew immediately yeah it was a disaster i i didn't connect it to the challenger at the time but yeah i knew immediately my instinct told me that that's not something you survived from not long after that we got a message ordering us to see and go out and commence recovery operations 5-10 miles off the coast is where the debris field was just started searching the ocean for debris i vividly remember one of the lookouts alerted to something on the horizon that was in the water and i noticed a little bobbing object in the distance and we altered course and went over to discover the personal effects case and in it were christine mcauliffe's personal effects notebooks and her cameras and a substantial supply of spare film so what we say today is only an inadequate expression of what we carry in our hearts words pale in the shadow of grief they seem insufficient even to measure the brave sacrifice of those you loved and we so admired we can find consolation only in faith for we know in our hearts that you who flew so high and so proud now make your home beyond the stars safe in god's promise of eternal life every family member i talked to asked specifically that we continue the program that that is what their departed loved one would want above all else we will not disappoint them the next day when i went to marshall and they had all the data there and i checked it all and i didn't see anything new ironically as i was walking out the door larry malloy told me to get the hell back in there that's why he says we got jim kingsberry at the cape that's viewing some films and he said he's looking for films and he sees this fire coming out of the side of the solid rocket booster and i turn to larry and says well you just tell jim kingsbury he doesn't know what the hell he's looking at because solid rockets don't go flying around with holes in the side of them they blow up he said well you better get back in here and talk to him so i asked jim i said you sure this is coming out of the solid rocket booster not the tank he's yeah absolutely sure it's coming on the solid rocket blister i said is it coming out of a joint she says well it's down on the bottom end of this right booster he said i can't really tell exactly but it's in the area where the solid rocket booster attaches to the tank i said well uh have you ever seen looked at any of the film of the actual launch on the as it was lifting off because i don't know how we could possibly had a problem with a seal that waited till 73 seconds to cause this failure and i said go get the cameras closest to that and he did and that's when he told me he saw this puff of smoke coming out and i said i bet it's around six tenths of a second his jack point six three eight and then i realized that the initial failure was exactly the concern that we had the night before it just manifested itself in a final failure much different than we would ever anticipated because what really happened was is that it leaked the very reason we thought it might at six tenths of a second but as that flame went and burned the primary and secondary seal that allowed the gas to get all the way out and as it burned the o-ring it hit this cold solid metal and it solidified right where it burned the ovary and formed what i call an in-situ ceramic seal sealed itself up and there was no evidence of anything coming out of that joint after the first couple seconds at all until 73. at 59 seconds which is what we call max q on the vehicle maximum dynamic pressure when the combination of the velocity of the vehicle and the air density puts the highest aerodynamic loads on the system starts vibrating well it just so happened that day was the first time that the jet stream was right over the cape that jet stream kept trying to push the vehicle sideways as it was going up into the air and because it was trying to push it off its trajectory the nozzles at the bottom of the booster would can't to get it back on trajectory in the process of doing that it flexes the vehicle and that occurred right near max q broke loose this fragile ceramic seal that was formed by aluminum monoxide so it started flowing out of that joint again at about 59 or 60 seconds and 13 seconds later it burned enough of the tank out that it caused the tank basically to collapse and it collapsed together in that big explosion the solid rocket boosters then got ejected off and they kept on flying the very last thing they heard on the net from the astronauts was from michael smith the pilot said uh oh just before the explosion so he had obviously seen something scared him they made it clear to the world that you know this horrible disaster uh that occurred the astronauts basically were almost killed instantaneously from the explosion they didn't know until several weeks later when they recovered the crew cabin that that wasn't the case the crew cabin at the bottom of the ocean separated from the vehicle which surprised everybody intact and what they found was that this crew cabin when they were launched was in a pressurized crew cabin just like you get on an airliner but they have emergency oxygen available to them they also have what they call peeps in there personal egress air packs for each astronaut and they're basically air that gives them two or three minutes of breathing time to get away well they acknowledge the pilot and the commander both had their peeps on and they can't even be activated unless it's done by a crew member behind them and they were somewhat spent they also said that others were also in their peeps they did not say that everyone was in it but this my suspect they probably all were so they probably all died at water impact almost three minutes later two and a half minutes or so that is what really hard to take is realizing they probably didn't die till he hit the water when i came home says you al you're gonna i got a phone call here you have to leave tonight on the company jet and go to an emergency meeting of the presidential commission investigating the challenger accident in washington this question earlier about i think you phrased it a concern by thigh call on uh low temperatures and nasa made it very clear that they were going to handle the whole meeting present everything if they needed any help from anybody they would specifically request it i might mention one of the major concerns which has been voiced both this morning and this afternoon is the concern about low temperatures on january 28th the day the challenger was launched there were icy conditions at the launch pad however nasa is insisting as it has insisted before that the cold temperatures in no way created a safety concern for the shuttle or for its astronauts aboard when it came back dr sally wright had a stack of these pink telephone slips in her hand and she says you know before we get back to the presentation i got a call from one of these returners calls to a reporter here in washington that said they heard there was some rumor that one of the contractors was so concerned about the predicted cold temperatures they may even recommended not launching is that really true i remember larry molloy's comment was well we had a lot of people had some concerns about cold temperatures on batteries and this and that and because of that we had all our engineers on a teleconference with all of our engineers in huntsville and the folks at at down at the cape and reviewed all that and as a result of that thai call told us to proceed on with the launch as planned and they gave us a written document signed to that effect and went back to his charts and i sat up there kind of scratching my head and thought well i guess that's true but that's about as deceiving as anything i ever heard and he started through more charts and i finally couldn't hold it anymore so i raised my hand and i was sitting up there in the dark nobody paying attention couldn't see so i started walking down the steps and interestingly enough they were asking a question on the new charts that give larry and larry turner says hey al mcdonald has something to add here i said well i'd like to forget what's projected on the wall here and go back to this question that dr wright had asked about whether it's true that a contractor may have recommended not launching i said i think that this commission should know that martin thicke all was so concerned about the colt emperors that we recommended not launching below 53 degrees fahrenheit and i'll never forget chairman rogers standing up and looking at me and neil armstrong and kind of screaming so well who in the hell are you he said would you please come down here in front of this conference room and repeat what i think i heard because of this if i heard what i think i heard this will be in litigation for years to come my life changed when he said that did you ever have an experience where all the engineers voted one way and management voted the other that wasn't the case here what was the case here but my question is did any of the engineers change their minds and if so which ones well let's say i i would say then that uh to look at the list here do you remember any other occasion when the contractor recommended against launch and the that you persuaded them that they were wrong and changed had them changed their mind uh no sir you'll remember that i did say at one point that we thought the decision-making process may be flawed i believe i'm speaking for the old commission when i say that we think it is flawed this tragic accident was a result of the failure of that joint on the right aft booster rocket you've taken so much evidence showing that people knew about the problem of the old rings and taya call and elsewhere some other literally in one document even cried out for help you took testimony about the pre-launch activities the teleconferences where biocall engineers recommended against launching when you sip through everything how did it come about that the people responsible decided to launch anywhere we've attempted to set that forth in in our report i don't believe there's any easy answer to it uh it's flawed that that i suppose no one will disagree with that well it was a failure and i think you have to sit down and read the report and draw your own conclusions nobody during challenger or columbia made decisions that they thought would cause harm to the crew or the vehicle the decisions that those people made they thought they were making a good decision when i went home i got called in by the general manager the next monday he said first thing in the morning dal you're no longer the head of the uh director of the space shuttle solar regular project you're now ahead of scheduling is it scheduling what the hell going to schedule build anything he said well that's your problem once i got removed from my job i was told i could not participate in the failure team anymore i couldn't have any contact with nasa anymore and it just so happened that two months later in may of 1986 i was called back to washington dc general don katina who was the head of the air force space command in los angeles he also was a member of the presidential commission on the challenger accident she said you ought to be spending all of your time figuring out why the shuttle failed the way it did i saw i'm not doing that so i'm not not doing that he said you remember the failure team are you i said i was but got removed he said you got removed when did that happen i said i think it was exactly one day after i testified before you people he said you're kidding me i said no i'm not he said we'll fix that problem he immediately went out in the hall and called chairman william rogers and told him what he had just heard chairman rogers called all of the senior executives in my company back to a meeting a couple days later in washington and wire brushed the hell out of them the following monday i got called in by our new general manager and he said al you know he says uh we've been uh working with nasa and figuring out how to get the shuttle back to safe flight as soon as possible and we decided to do that by having this super task force and he said you know we'd like to offer you that job would you take it i says yeah i'd take that job because i think i can help start three two one americans return to space as discovery clears the tower when i was at the first launch after challenger which was in september of 88 discovery first of all i breathed a huge sigh of relief when we cleared the tower and i didn't see anything abnormal but i really got nervous when they got to the point where they told them they were going to throttle down the engines which they did and then they said gopher throttle up and i heard the commander respond back just like scoby did roger because i quickly had a flashback of what happened to challenger within a second of that time we've had one of the most successful space programs in the history of mankind and it's tragic that we lost seven souls but i'm clear that the progress that we have made is on their shoulders and i think we'll continue i've lost friends very good friends in rockets but on the other hand i don't think that's a reason to stop pushing the limits pushing the thresholds i think the the biggest lesson that we learned from challenger a couple of them space exploration is challenging it's hard and i think the the important lesson is you know creating an environment where everybody is heard where you can voice your concerns without fear of retaliation well when i define accident i i put all those terms that describe accidents not foreseen anticipated most accidents you don't have that opportunity to make a decision to prevent it in this case there was an opportunity for a decision to prevent it the challenger accident was an accident but it was one for which there were some pointers there should have been more awareness challenger was a terrible accident that could have been prevented and we were both angry we were both angry to know that it could have been prevented and yet human failure we understand and they've long been forgiven for those frailties do you

Channel: Jason Payne

Views: 1,886,223

Rating: 4.8114805 out of 5

Keywords: NASA, Challenger, 30 YEARS, DOCUMENTARY, space, emmy, explosion, failure, shuttle, explore, doc, short doc

Id: 2FehGJQlOf0

Length: 50min 22sec (3022 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2016