Word: mortons
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...Morton-Thiokol manufactured the booster rocket which caused the space shuttle Challenger to explode last January, killing seven astronauts, destroying hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware, and crippling--perhaps irreparably--the U.S. space program...
...Morton-Thiokol treat the O-rings with the scrutiny and care befitting a crucial shuttle component? You decide. In a subcontractor's assembly plant, inspectors found workers storing their lunches in refrigerators alongside strips of rubber used to manufacture the crucial seals. Workers were also found to be using paint marks on the floor to measure the O-rings. And in one Morton-Thiokol plant, an Air Force inspector discovered that new and used O-rings were stored in the same area. In his report, he speculated on the "possibility of intermixing" them during the assembly of the rocket boosters...
MAYBE THIS SHOULDN'T shock us. We've heard about the ineptitude of military/defense contractors before. But after Morton-Thiokol had actually delivered the rocket boosters to NASA, against common sense only multiplied...
...months before the Challenger disaster, one Morton-Thiokol engineer wrote a memo urging that all shuttle flights cease until questions about O-ring performance could be resolved. Management ignored that advice...
Then, on the eve of the doomed launch, 15 Morton-Thiokol engineers agreed--unanimously--that NASA shouldn't launch the Challenger. They were fearful that overnight sub-freezing temperatures at the Kennedy Space Center would prevent the O-rings from functioning properly. (Morton-Thiokol had never bothered to test the rings' performance at such low temperatures...