Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...What did NASA do about its problem? Not much, even though boosters recovered after several flights showed O-ring erosion, indicating that the hot gases were reaching them and threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded...
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...
Then came yet another bizarre twist in NASA's paper shuffle. The Marshall managers grew tired of dealing with so many open problems listed for the shuttle that they asked Morton Thiokol to try to winnow the items. Brian Russell, Thiokol's manager of special projects for the boosters, promptly filed a memo last Dec. 6 to the director of the solid-rocket project at Thiokol, recommending that the O-ring erosion be dropped from the critical- problems list. Mysteriously, an unsigned paper produced by Marshall's problem- assessment system declared that "this problem is considered closed...
...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 a "management" vote in which the engineers seated beside them had no voice. Even though Thiokol had taken the seal problem seriously enough to spend more than $2 million seeking a remedy, its top officers involved in shuttle work now ignored the Florida chill and approved...