Allan McDonald has passed away. He tried to stop the Challenger launch… He was overruled…
An engineer for the maker of the shuttle’s booster rockets, he opposed letting it take off, worried that cold weather might affect them. He was right.
Full article, HERE.
RIP Mr. McDonald, your legacy of honesty and perseverance will live forever.
Engineers should be required to learn this story of courage in the face of management pressure.
Well done Mr. McDonald.
The world would be a better and safer place if we had more people with your courage and character.
I remember Challenger like it was yesterday. In 10 years, it was the coldest day I ever saw in Florida. Sadly, he was all to right in his belief.
What was really sad was the Shuttle was supposed to be launched from Vandenberg, potentially. Which, in winter time, regularly got a light frosting of frost.
So the whole mess of the contractor screwing up the Shuttle facility at VAFB actually might have saved lives.
I was still working my first job out of engineering school on that fateful day, which was also the last job I ever worked on a drafting board with triangles, scales, compasses, French curves, and rotating your pencil tips in your fingers as you pulled them along your tools, and all that. I still have my tape ball, Ames lettering guide, and my electric eraser.
I remember hearing that in the aftermath they had some whiz-kid rattling on for almost 2 hours about how the resilient material of the o-rings was not suspect, during which time physicist Richard Feynman had dunked an o-ring in a cup of icewater, squashed it in his fingers and let it sit. “This kid has been talking for two hours,” he said as he lifted the oblong ring out of the cup, “and the ring still has not returned to its original shape.”
It is a tragedy of the American business model that in Mr. McDonald’s later career he never found a job paying higher than the one wherein he had rightfully blown the whistle. Managers prefer team players to than truth seekers, and despite the PE creed to hold paramount the public health, safety, and welfare.
All- Thanks for the comments. My memories are of the flights searching for debris, the capsule, and anything else. It was a miracle we didn’t have multiple mid-air collisions with the number of search airplanes involved.
Thank you for your service in those missions and all the others you have flown. I always felt that it is to you, and others like you in the air or heaving on choppy seas in a rescue vessel while families are waiting ashore waiting for ‘that phone call,’ that Gordon Lightfoot’s verse applies:
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
Watched the launch on NASA TV. Watched the aftermath on NASA TV. It took over 30 minutes for someone to finally cut the feed from the control room.
Not a brilliant day on NASA’s part.
And, sadly, NASA seems to have lost what little they learned from it.
Thank you for publishing this.
Guy- We were looking for shipmates… It was the least we could do, but thank you.
Beans- We were in the air in less than an hour. Never saw any of the coverage. Just saw the split as I got home, turned around and went right back in.
Jet- You’re most welcome, sir.
Yea….there were people, especially Mr McDonald, who had serious concerns over the safety of launching after such cold temperatures. They were shut down and silenced by buraucrats and executives more concerned with appearing incompetent by scrubbing the launch rather than the safety of the circumstances. Those same assclowns started looking for scapegoats to blame before the wreckage of the shuttle had settled to the floor of the Atlantic.
I’m in the middle of reading the book “Truth, Lies, and O-Rings” that he wrote about the Challenger disaster. It takes a big pair of stones to tell a Senate Committee “NO”. I wish I had had a chance to meet him, he sounds like a real, old fashioned, moral, engineer. Not enough of them these days. The world is a poorer place without him.
Dan- That they were…
Merlin- That it is. That is an excellent book!