Word: boosterism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...evidence suggests that Rockwell's drug situation had anything to do with the Challenger tragedy. The solid rocket booster that is suspected of causing the explosion was made by Chicago-based Morton Thiokol, and no reports of drug use among its employees have surfaced. Nonetheless, any drug abuse among production workers in the space program or the defense industry carries grave risks. Says Frankel: "In this kind of ultra-high-tech work, the guy who makes the little adjustments, the screwer-on of parts, the bolter of nuts, is just as important as the project's chief engineer...
NASA, meanwhile, continued to defend itself in the commission's public hearings at Cape Canaveral. NASA technicians speculated on a variety of reasons--other than the cold weather--why a joint in Challenger's right solid- fuel booster began leaking, spewing superhot gases and probably triggering the catastrophe. The commission seemed unimpressed. Chairman William Rogers urged NASA to include independent experts in making its evaluations. Otherwise, he protested, "The people running the tests, if successful, can prove that they were right all along...
When the all-important teleconference began at 8:45 p.m., Lawrence Mulloy, chief of the booster program at Marshall, had joined Reinartz and McDonald at the Cape end of the network. Lovingood and Hardy were at Huntsville. In Utah, Lund was joined by Joe Kilminster, vice president for booster programs; Jerald Mason, senior vice president, and Calvin Wiggins, vice president for space projects. A dozen Thiokol engineers in Utah were also participating. Boisjoly presented six charts that had been transmitted to the others and argued that "lower temperature was a factor" in O-ring performance. Lund, the highest engineering officer...
Mulloy and Hardy led the NASA challenge to this conclusion. Hardy said that he was "appalled" by the reasoning behind the no-fly stance of Thiokol, $ while Mulloy insisted that there was no demonstrable link between temperature and O-ring erosion. He contended that despite NASA's placing the booster seals on the criticality-1 list because of a lack of redundancy, the backup ring would certainly seat in the critical early-ignition phase of the launch and provide a seal even if gases got by the first ring. Since NASA had not established a minimum launch temperature...
Understandably, the Rogers commission wanted to know what had caused the switch at Thiokol. Testified Lund: "We got ourselves into the thought process that we were trying to find some way to prove to them it (the booster) wouldn't work. We couldn't prove absolutely that it wouldn't work." When Mason was asked whether telling Lund to put on his management hat did not amount to pressuring his subordinate to change his mind, he replied, "Well, I hope not, but it could be interpreted that way." Both Hardy and Mulloy insisted that they had exerted no pressure...