Word: mulloy
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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...
...question but forcefully defended the facts in his memo. Two days later, he told the press that NASA engineers had "whispered" in his ear that because of the O-ring problems they "held their breaths" during every shuttle launch. In other testimony, one of NASA's booster experts, Lawrence Mulloy, conceded that damage to the rings had occurred previously. In the 171 joints from spent booster segments that NASA has examined, he said, six primary rings showed signs of erosion...
...NASA's Mulloy conceded that the rings start to lose their resiliency at a temperature of 50 degrees F. But despite some reservations expressed the day before the tragedy by booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol, Mulloy said, NASA technicians had concluded (and Thiokol experts concurred) that the seals would work. Mulloy later volunteered that even if the primary O ring failed, the backup ring "would seat as it has done in the past, even under those temperature conditions...
...Mulloy's statement seemed at odds with a 1982 NASA report. The document concluded that because of shifting motions in the boosters at launch, the secondary O rings might not seat properly. But NASA decided that the shuttle could keep flying without an assured backup, knowing that the consequences of failure, in the agency's own words, could be "loss of mission, vehicle and crew...