What the Dog Saw [116]
When it was all over, Faldo wrapped his arms around Norman. “I don’t know what to say — I just want to give you a hug,” he whispered, and then he said the only thing you can say to a choker: “I feel horrible about what happened. I’m so sorry.” With that, the two men began to cry.
August 21 and 28, 2000
Blowup
WHO CAN BE BLAMED FOR A DISASTER LIKE THE CHALLENGER EXPLOSION? NO ONE, AND WE’D BETTER GET USED TO IT
1.
In the technological age, there is a ritual to disaster. When planes crash or chemical plants explode, each piece of physical evidence — of twisted metal or fractured concrete — becomes a kind of fetish object, painstakingly located, mapped, tagged, and analyzed, with findings submitted to boards of inquiry that then probe and interview and soberly draw conclusions. It is a ritual of reassurance, based on the principle that what we learn from one accident can help us prevent another, and a measure of its effectiveness is that Americans did not shut down the nuclear industry after Three Mile Island and do not abandon the skies after each new plane crash. But the rituals of disaster have rarely been played out so dramatically as they were in the case of the Challenger space shuttle, which blew up over southern Florida on January 28, 1986.
Fifty-five minutes after the explosion, when the last of the debris had fallen into the ocean, recovery ships were on the scene. They remained there for the next three months, as part of what turned into the largest maritime salvage operation in history, combing a hundred and fifty thousand square nautical miles for floating debris, while the ocean floor surrounding the crash site was inspected by submarines. In mid-April of 1986, the salvage team found several chunks of charred metal that confirmed what had previously been only suspected: the explosion was caused by a faulty seal in one of the shuttle’s rocket boosters, which had allowed a stream of flame to escape and ignite an external fuel tank.
Armed with this confirmation, a special presidential investigative commission concluded the following June that the deficient seal reflected shoddy engineering and lax management at NASA and its prime contractor, Morton Thiokol. Properly chastised, NASA returned to the drawing board, to emerge thirty-two months later with a new shuttle — Discovery — redesigned according to the lessons learned from the disaster. During that first post-Challenger flight, as America watched breathlessly, the crew of the Discovery held a short commemorative service. “Dear friends,” the mission commander, Captain Frederick H. Hauck, said, addressing the seven dead Challenger astronauts, “your loss has meant that we could confidently begin anew.” The ritual was complete. NASA was back.
But what if the assumptions that underlie our disaster rituals aren’t true? What if these public postmortems don’t help us avoid future accidents? Over the past few years, a group of scholars has begun making the unsettling argument that the rituals that follow things like plane crashes or the Three Mile Island crisis are as much exercises in self-deception as they are genuine opportunities for reassurance. For these revisionists, high-technology accidents may not have clear causes at all. They may be inherent in the complexity of the technological systems we have created.
This revisionism has now been extended to the Challenger disaster, with the publication of The Challenger Launch Decision, by the sociologist Diane Vaughan, which is the first truly definitive analysis of the events leading up to January 28, 1986. The conventional view is that the Challenger accident was an anomaly, that it happened because people at NASA had not done their job. But the study’s conclusion is the opposite: it says that the accident happened because people at NASA had done exactly what they were supposed to do. “No fundamental decision was made at NASA to do evil,” Vaughan writes.