Word: boosterism
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...right rocket is the chief suspect as the cause of the tragedy and investigators want to retrieve its debris for possible clues. Some officials have said the cause may never be found unless the booster can be examined...
...hearings did make it clear that there had long been doubts about the reliability of the seals at the three joints between the booster rocket's four main segments. Attention remained focused on the two large synthetic rubber O rings set in grooves and designed, like washers in a faucet, to keep the rocket's superhot gases from escaping out the joints...
...amount of erosion experienced in the O rings on previous flights. Boisjoly worried in particular about Shuttle Mission 51-C in January 1985, in which the seal temperature had been 53 degrees (although the air had warmed to 66 degrees by the time of launch). When the spent boosters were recovered from that flight, what Boisjoly described as black soot "just like coal" was found behind a primary ring in one booster, indicating that gases had blown past the first ring. Although erosion had also been found after flights in warmer temperatures, 51-C had been exposed to overnight lows...
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...