The Challenger

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 shuttl

. . .
g to take what they considered to be a small risk for the greater good of a program that they believed in. One of the reasons that NASA officials may not have taken the engineers warnings to heart was that they may have seemed to be unfounded in empirical data. The engineers had previously told NASA officials that there was a range of reactions by the O-rings to differing conditions that was less than ideal but within what the engineers considered to be the margin of "acceptable risk". It was not until the night before the Challenger launch that the engineers responsible for this part realized that their calculations had not taken into account low temperatures at the time of the launch: On the eve of the launch, engineers realized that their construction of acceptable risk did not take low temperature into account. They did not have an "experience base" below 53¦ F and knew that colder O-rings would take longer to seal (they did not need the Noble-prize physicist Richard Feymann to point that out to them at the Presidential Hearing on the disaster). To NASA, it looked like engineers were making up new criteria on the spot. Engineering managers then took matters into their own hands--they put on their management hats--becaus
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Chuck Yeager, Glazer Glazer, , Presidential Hearing, O-rings NASA, White House, Morton Thiokol, nasa officials, Ronald Reagan, Peterson Farrell, Mich'l Smith, wouldn't call, glazer glazer, hard data, engineers hard data, data engineers, shuttle challenger, shuttle safe, space agency, engineers hard, fuel tank,
Approximate Word count = 1278
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

More Essays on The Challenger