Anyone who has ever seen the footage of the explosion of the Challenger - echoed so terribly and so eerily this winter when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry -may well have asked himself or herself how such a disaster could have happened. For the explosion of the Challenger was in large measure predictable: The O-rings that failed and caused the deaths of all of those aboard were known to be a problematic element in the shuttle design. And yet, a number of workers at NASA and at the various subcontractors that the space agency used were aware of the potential for disaster. Why didn't they intervene? What about the culture of NASA at the time prevented those who knew about the problem from blowing the whistle?
Before we answer these questions, it may be useful to lay out the basic facts of what occurred on Jan. 28, 1986. On that day the shuttle Challenger 73 blew up only 73 seconds after it took off from the Kennedy Space Center. All those aboard - Gregory B. Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Francis Scobee and Mich'l J. Smith died. In the aftermath of the shuttle's explosion, Ronald Reagan created a commission to study the incident. Feaded by former secretary of state William Rogers and including Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager, the commission determined that the shuttle's fatal flaw lay in a sealant ring - and on the shoulders of NASA officials who had overridden the concerns expressed by NASA engineers that the shuttle was not safe, especially when the weather on launch days was cold.
As Vaughan (1996) describes the disaster, it was the combination of the deal's structure and cold weather which shrank the sealant material allowed hot gases to leak, which in turn allowed flames from the booster rocket to push through the failed O-ring, and then to burn the shuttle's external fuel tank and through a right-hand booster support. When the booster broke free, it collided with a ...