Word: boosterism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...report said space agency engineers are working on a completely new design for the booster rockets which caused the Jan. 28 Challenger explosion, as a contingency in case no other approach is found suitable for the joint seals on the boosters...
NASA was even warned by outside experts that its booster joints were a serious problem. On March 9, 1984, George Morefield, then chief engineer for United Space Boosters, wrote to Lawrence Mulloy, then the booster manager at Marshall, to explain that the Titan rockets produced by his company for the Air Force had a similar joint problem. Although a thousand of the Titan joints had flown without a failure, Morefield told Mulloy, on a shuttle flight "the potential for failure of the joint is higher...
What did NASA do about its problem? Not much, even though boosters recovered after several flights showed O-ring erosion, indicating that the hot gases were reaching them and threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded...
While the search for a fix proceeded, Bob Ebeling, manager of the booster- ignition system at Morton Thiokol, wrote a plaintive interoffice memo on Oct. 1, 1985, saying, "HELP! The seal task force is constantly being delayed by every possible means . . . The allegiance to the O-ring investigation task force is very limited to a group of engineers numbering 8-10 . . . We wish we could get action by verbal request, but such is not the case. This is a red flag...
...joint failed it would lead to "loss of mission and crew." While that presumably should have alerted NASA's flight officials to the urgency of the matter, there was a complication: fully 748 parts of the shuttle carried the same criticality-1 designation, including 114 on the booster motors. None was given any priority in urgency, so none stood out as demanding a quick remedy...