Word: mulloy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After Smith's suit was reported last week, Mulloy announced that he was planning to retire from NASA at week's end. A 26-year NASA veteran, Mulloy, 52, offered no explanation...
...commission did she criticize the "incredibly terrible judgments, shockingly sparse concern for human life . . . and some very bewildering thought processes" by NASA officials. Last week her feelings became even clearer. It was learned that she had filed a suit seeking $15.1 million from the space agency, specifically naming Lawrence Mulloy, who was then chief of the faulty solid-rocket-booster program. He had argued more forcefully than anyone else against the warnings of others that the cold weather could jeopardize the launch...
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...
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...
Confronting Mulloy with the documents in a closed hearing, Rogers asked how this dismissal of a crucial difficulty could happen. Mulloy replied that the closeout had been a mistake, "a failure of the human being within the system." Snapped Rogers: "It was a little more than that. It's a failure of the whole system if one letter and one human being can close out a constraint that has been concerning you for many years." Rogers asked Russell why he had recommended the closure. "Because I was asked to," Russell answered. "Well," commented Rogers with biting sarcasm, "that explains...