_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [101]
That evening, the executives in New York decided I had the best chance of breaking the story of what caused Challenger’s accident, and they sent in all the help we could use. The next morning I hit the ground running.
I locked myself in my office and started making phone calls, talking with the grunts that turned the wrenches on the launch pad as well as supervisors and management types. I kept getting the same. No facts. Nothing. Just opinion.
I kept getting the same until one source made an off-hand comment about a concern raised the day before the launch by a Morton Thiokol engineer in Brigham City, Utah.
Thiokol built the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle, and after further research, I learned the concerned person was senior rocket booster engineer Roger Boisjoly. Boisjoly had raised questions about earlier problems with the joints between booster segments, and Thiokol managers decided to alert managers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Marshall oversaw the booster’s design and production, and Thiokol decided to tell NASA management that the cold weather could seriously affect the shuttle booster’s joints.
Boisjoly’s concern was with the synthetic rubber O-rings designed to seal the joints and prevent hot gases and flames from escaping. On several shuttle flights, the primary O-ring had suffered severe hot gas erosion, and in a few instances minor erosion was found on the secondary O-ring seals. The problem was simple: The lower the outdoor temperature, the greater the erosion.
I learned that five months before Challenger’s accident, on August 19, 1985, Marshall Space Flight Center and Thiokol officials briefed NASA headquarters for the first time on the history and potential of the O-ring problem. They had not recommended halting flights, saying that continuing to fly was an acceptable risk while the joints were being redesigned.
Acceptable risk?
I phoned Cecil Houston, Marshall Space Flight Center’s manager at the Cape, and asked him what in the hell was going on.
Cecil told me he had chaired two teleconferences the night before launch, and everyone decided the O-rings would not be a problem. “Everybody signed off on it, including Thiokol,” he said. “We agreed we should fly.”
“With the freeze we had you guys didn’t think the O-rings would be a problem?”
“Naw,” he assured me. “It was one of the engines.”
“You know that for sure?”
“No, not yet,” he insisted, “but we’re looking. Something came loose.”
“Like a fan?”
“Could be,” Houston agreed, but quickly added, “Don’t go with that yet, Jay. That’s what we think happened. I’ll let you know when we’ve got something.”
Cecil Houston was a damn good engineer and a devoted manager. I knew he would be the last person to deliberately put an astronaut at risk, but nevertheless I could not believe the lack of concern about the O-rings.
I thanked Cecil and decided to phone a longtime friend who’d been brought to the space program by Gus Grissom before any astronaut crawled into a spaceship: Sam Beddingfield, the man who had retired only a couple of weeks before as deputy director of Shuttle Projects Management—the same Sam Beddingfield who told Gus Grissom he didn’t need a parachute because he wouldn’t have time to put it on. The same Sam Beddingfield who Gus told, “Put the parachute in my Mercury capsule anyway. It’ll give me something to do until I hit.”
Sam Beddingfield’s experience and contacts were definitely what I needed. If anyone could find out what the brass on headquarters’ fourth floor was up to, it was Sam.
I grabbed the phone, dialed, and listened to the rings. “Hello.”
“Sam, this is Jay Barbree.”
“Yeah, Jay, what’s up?