Word: jointly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meanwhile NASA's paper work continued to track the problem. On Dec. 17, 1982, the joint was moved to the agency's "criticality 1" list, meaning that it lacked a reliable backup part and that if the 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...
There was yet another roadblock to action: despite the documents, top flight officials at Marshall, including Mulloy, believed that the seal had redundancy in the critical early stages of ignition. Dutifully, however, Mulloy slapped a formal launch constraint on the joint problem. That meant that there could be no shuttle flight until the seal was fixed. But few above Mulloy even knew the constraint existed; worse yet, having imposed the restraint, Mulloy routinely waived it before each launch. So the shuttles flew, its astronauts innocently unaware of the lingering joint danger...
...joint's troubled history was completely dismissed on the eve of Challenger's launch. The seals had long been flagged as a problem that could be aggravated by low temperatures. Yet George Hardy, Marshall's deputy director of science and engineering, declared that he was "appalled" by Thiokol's reasoning that the cape's cold weather, predicted to be in the 30s at lift-off, should lead to a delay. In the now notorious teleconference, four Thiokol vice presidents at first concurred with the fears of their engineers. But when they heard the NASA objections, they decided to take...
...could this happen? Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist who turned out to be one of the commission's most insightful members, probably explained it best. The joint hazard was often discussed before a flight, Feynman pointed out. "It flies and nothing happens," he theorized at a commission hearing. "Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flight--we can lower our standards a bit because we got away with it last time. It's a kind of Russian roulette." In fact, with each pull of the launch trigger, the odds...
...awareness," says their record- company president, Bob Biggs--the BoDeans are built for the long haul. It wasn't so long ago, after all, that Neumann and his buddy Sammy Llanas (a.k.a. Sammy BoDean), now 25, played one night a week, just for drinks, in the window of a joint in their hometown of Waukesha. "There was a bar in one room and a connecting room with a couple of pool tables," Sammy remembers. "Sometimes there'd be a couple of guys shooting a game, but usually we played to nobody...