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Pat McLaughlin's avatar

I worked at Morton Thiokol starting about 9 months before the Challenger.

My memories of the disaster are acute. We were at work. People would and running in the halls. And the shitshow that followed.

The o-rings didn't fail. Those boosters had a stellar record (compared to other boosters...). But they were launched outside of safe launch parameters, in fact outside of design parameters. They failed to do what they weren't designed to do. And it's a tale of pressure from above to say yes to things that should not have been said yes to, by execs and bean counters.

Pressure came all the way from the white house. Likely not Reagan personally, but someone close saying the president wants this launch. Make it happen.

It was a brutal lesson in how decisions get made—and why—by the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. And how the people responsible (at Morton Thiokol, at NASA, and at the White House) weren’t held accountable. But people who they abused and pressured and browbeat were. And people who weren’t even in the decision loop were, as well. In the wake of all that, they suggested that the booster construction workers needed drug testing (as a “benefit”).

(Someday, democracy of some sort will come to our workplaces—and things will be far from perfect, still. But it will be far better.)

I spent months of my work life thereafter documenting the o-ring/joint redesign for Congress. Hundreds of others did the design work. We spent vast amounts upgrading — making heavier and theoretically more effective — the o-ring joints. Which made the rockets heavier, which meant less payload could be sent to orbit. To ‘improve’ a joint that only failed when it was tested by launching under conditions that it was never designed to function in. And which the new joint would never be launched in, because of the past. It was... the Maginot Line; glorious on paper, designed for the past that would not be repeated, immensely costly, and... useless.

But it helped maintain a smokescreen or accountability.

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