Challenger at 40: Lessons from a tragedy

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0:29I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday Story where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. On the morning of January 28th 1986 Bob Ebling was anxious and angry as he drove to work to the Morton Thiokol booster rocket complex outside Brigham City, Utah. He knew that 2 ,000 miles away, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ice had formed on the launch pad that cradled the space shuttle Challenger. Seven astronauts, including a civilian, a high school teacher, were set for liftoff that morning. Ebling believed their lives were at stake. His daughter Leslie was in the car with him.

1:13And he said, we are going to have a catastrophic event today. The night before, Ebling and his Thiokol colleagues, all booster rocket engineers, argued for a launch delay. They said the freezing weather overnight could cause a catastrophic failure in the booster rockets that would lift Challenger towards space. And he said, the Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die. And he was beating his hands on the dashboard, he was frantic. But in Florida, all systems were go. The NASA launch control team declared Challenger ready to fly. I uphold the technical community and you will have our consensus to proceed with this launch.

2:06Good luck and Godspeed. Except that wasn't true. There wasn't consensus among the technical community to proceed. But the launch director and other top NASA officials didn't know this. They didn't know that Ebling and other engineers at Morton Thiokol had told other NASA officials it was too risky to launch. Today on the Sunday story, we look back 40 years ago this week at that desperate 11th hour effort to keep the space shuttle Challenger grounded, at the resistance to heeding those warnings, at a persistent and crushing burden of guilt for some of those involved, and at lessons learned from the Challenger disaster, which continue to resonate today.

2:56If they would avoid it one day, discussion here would be completely different.

3:09We'll be right back.

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4:28I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story. And today we're looking back at the Challenger disaster of 40 years ago. With us is retired NPR correspondent Howard Berkus, who investigated the decision to launch that day back in 1986. He and another NPR journalist were the first to report in detail on the desperate last-minute efforts to delay Challenger's liftoff. Howard, welcome back to The Sunday Story. It's always good to be with you, Aisha. Thank you so much. So, I mean, Howard, I have to say we're looking at the anniversary that is 40 years old, but I'm also 40 years old. So I don't have any personal memory of when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.

5:18And there are a lot of people in my generation and younger. It's like it's history right to us. But you were a part of that history. And I can say I didn't know that till today. But I'm learning something. You were living it in real time. So take us back to 1986. Like, what was at stake for the space program with that Challenger launch? You know, there was so much at stake, Aisha. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was desperate to prove that space shuttles could literally be like shuttle buses, you know, rocketing skyward and returning to Earth on a regular and reliable schedule.

6:06And to do that, to carry into space these commercial, scientific, and even secret military payloads, they had to prove they could launch in every month of the year on both warm days and cold days. So how common had space shuttle flights become by January 1986, that was when the Challenger was scheduled to launch. You know, by then, shuttles had been flying for five years, and there'd been more than two dozen missions, but delays plagued the program a lot. This was a highly technical spacecraft, after all, with thousands of complex components, so a lot could go wrong. Plus, there were other uncontrollable variables, like the weather.

6:51In fact, this Challenger launch had already been delayed five times. Okay. So it sounds like NASA was really struggling with reliability in the shuttle program, especially when dealing with elements out of their control, like weather and all this stuff. No, that's right. But still, you know, shuttle flights had become routine enough by 1986 that public interest had waned. In fact, the three major television broadcast networks at the time had stopped covering shuttle launches live. Only cable news network CNN and NASA's satellite feed were set to go live for this Challenger launch. And Aisha, the lack of major network coverage was likely concerning to NASA because public attention and enthusiasm were important to assure continued funding of the space program.

7:45And Challenger was set to have a teacher on board, Krista McAuliffe, who taught high school in New Hampshire. Was her participation part of NASA's effort to attract more attention to shuttle flights? Absolutely, and it worked. There was enormous attention to the process of picking a teacher in space. There were 11 ,000 applicants after all. And when Krista McAuliffe came out on top, her astronaut training attracted even more attention. Several days before the Challenger launch, McAuliffe stood before a gaggle of microphones and a royal blue astronaut jumpsuit at the Kennedy Space Center. She talked about her plans to teach the loftiest lessons ever.

8:29Well, I am so excited to be here. I don't think any teacher has ever been more ready to have two lessons in my life. I've been preparing these since September, and I just hope everybody tunes in on day four now to watch the teacher teaching from space. Oh my goodness. I mean, it does sound so exciting. And because I am a kid of the eighties, I remember a Punky Brewster episode where they showed that kids around the country were watching the launch on TV. Cause like, this is like educational. So now all the kids in the, you know, in school rooms, they could be watching like a teacher teaching from space.

9:12Yeah, the teachers had rolled out TV sets in classrooms all across the country so that the kids, one, could watch the launch live and then later watch these first ever lessons from space with a real teacher. And there were also busloads of schoolchildren in the crowd watching the launch at the Kennedy Space Center. Okay, so at this point, the Challenger launch had already been delayed five times. And so you got this teacher on board, people are excited. That is going to not look so great to have all those delays. It seems like there would be a lot of pressure on NASA to get the Challenger off the ground this time.

9:58There absolutely was a lot riding on getting Challenger launched. So let's get back to the morning of the launch, Howard. Remind us what happened. And I have to say, I'm dreading it because I heard the teacher, and she sounds so happy. But I know this is not a happy story. It's not. And it's so, so sad to hear her voice in this context. So let's go back to January 28, 1986. School children and space enthusiasts around the nation have their TV sets tuned in. And at the Morton Thiokol Complex in Utah, company executives and the booster rocket engineers crowded into a conference room to watch the launch on a large projection TV screen.

10:46Bob Ebling was there along with his daughter Leslie. and just the night before, Ebling and a few other Thiokol engineers had been in this same conference room on a conference call with officials from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The Thiokol engineers tried to convince those NASA officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center that the unusually cold weather in Florida could cause a booster rocket joint to fail. They thought Challenger would explode right at ignition. So you can imagine the tension and fear as they watched the launch countdown. And again, here's Bob Ebling's daughter, Leslie.

11:24They had the countdown. He managed 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. We have main engine start, 4, 3, 2, 1, and liftoff. Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower. And my dad bent down to tell me that it wasn't over yet, that things weren't clear. And I could feel him trembling. And then he wept loudly. We have no downlink. And the silence in that room was deafening. There was no one talking. It was just dead silence.

12:40At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a TV news camera and microphone focused on the crowd, including the faces of Kristen McAuliffe's parents as they looked in anguish skyward.

13:09The shock and the grief, it's so visceral and so overwhelming. even now, 40 years later. And there were so many people who witnessed this tragedy live, like people in the crowd, schoolchildren watching in classrooms, the families of the astronauts aboard Challenger. It is impossible for us to imagine the depths of grief for the families of Commander Dick Scobie, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, and Ronald McNair, payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, and teacher in space Krista McAuliffe. And as you know, Aisha, this was also a collective national catastrophe.

14:05Generations were scarred that day, and those not watching live as it happened were subjected to a tsunami of TV news reports with horrific images of billowing smoke and flames and pieces of the spacecraft shooting across the sky. NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Good evening. Tonight from Washington, D.C. It was a nightmare. The worst disaster in the U.S. space program ever. The shuttle Challenger is destroyed just a little more than one minute. Tonight, the search for survivors turned up none. The search for answers is just starting. So, Howard, it sounds like the engineers, at least, already knew what happened.

14:47They were sure they knew what happened. They knew that those frigid overnight temperatures could cause synthetic rubber O-rings in Challenger's booster rockets to stiffen and not fully seal the rocket's joints. So what are these O-rings and the joints? Like, how do they work? The shuttle booster rockets were stacked in segments. Think of them like tin cans stacked on top of each other. They were filled with highly volatile solid rocket fuel. Now, where those segments met, there were two rows of synthetic rubber O-rings, and they were designed to keep that fiery rocket fuel from shooting out sideways at the joints, Liftoff and early flight produced enormous pressures on those booster rockets, and those forces tended to pull the joints apart slightly.

15:40The O-rings kept the joints sealed, so the burning fuel went down out of the bottom of the rocket, lifting the spacecraft skyward. But I thought you had said that the shuttle program was trying to prove that shuttles could launch in both warm and cold places. So had there been previous cold weather launches? There had been launches that were relatively cold, cold enough to stiffen those rubber O-rings. Remember, rubber will stiffen when it gets cold. And before Challenger, the coldest launch had happened a year earlier when chilly temperatures had cooled the rocket joints to 53 degrees. And during that launch, the O-rings on two joints had failed to fully seal, searing rocket fuel and gases burned past the first row of O-rings and scorched the second.

16:34Why weren't those leaks catastrophic? That's because two sets of O-rings provided redundancy. The second set was there in case the first set burned through. And in this case, the second set held. But remember, on this morning in Florida in 1986, it was well below freezing, much, much colder than any flight before. And that had the Thiokol engineers worried that both rows of O-rings could fail. That's why they formally recommended a launch delay. NASA's booster rocket project managers at the Marshall Space Flight Center pushed back hard for hours until Thiokol executives overruled their engineers and told NASA it was okay to launch after all.

17:16Okay, so the executives buckled under the pressure. That's certainly what it looked like to their engineers. The tragedy of this is that the Thiokol engineers were right. Did the rest of the world learn, you know, quickly about these O-rings and the cold temperatures and that there was this effort to stop the launch? Small bits of the story leaked out, but it would be about three weeks before the complete story came out. That's because nobody at NASA and Thiokol talked about it. At least they didn't talk about it publicly. Thiokol had ordered their engineers to keep quiet. NASA seemed to downplay, some would say cover up, the fact that the Thiokol engineers had warned it was too dangerous to launch.

18:02So what happened in those days after the explosion? Well, just six days after the explosion, President Ronald Reagan established a special Challenger Commission to investigate the accident. And three days after that, we're at February 6 now, the commission held its very first hearing. That day, only NASA officials testified. And one of them was Judson Lovingood of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He was on that 11th hour conference call with Thiokol. We had the project managers from both Marshall and Thiokol in the discussion. We had the chief engineers from both places in the discussion and thiacol recommended uh to proceed in the launch so that that was a half truth right um and where i come from you know they say a half truth is really a whole lie but i don't want to put that on i don't want to put that on them but like the thiacol executives had said they were ready but the engineers had said they weren't that's right.

19:09And Lovingood did add that there was some concern about the cold temperatures, but that's all he said. And the commission moved on from there. No, that wasn't really what you would call full disclosure. Now, four days later, there was another closed door hearing at the old executive office building next to the White House. And at that point, another NASA official from the Marshall Space Flight Center, simply said this, quote, we all concluded there was no problem with the temperatures. But this time, one of the thiocole engineers was in the room. Alan McDonald was sitting way in the back in what he called the cheap seats, he told me in an interview in 2016.

19:54I was sitting there thinking, well, I guess that's true, but that's about as deceiving as anything I ever heard. And after two, three minutes, I couldn't restrain myself anymore. So I raised my hand. I said, I think this presidential commission should know that Martin Flacco was so concerned, we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. And we put that in writing and sent that to NASA. I'll never forget Chairman William Rogers and his vice chairman, Neil Armstrong, standing up, kind of squinting and looking at me. And Chairman Rogers said, would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard?

20:41So this was a hearing without reporters present, right? So that was a revelation that was not publicly revealed. That's right. and four days later, there was another hearing. Again, this one was also behind closed doors. This time, the commission finally heard formal testimony from two of the Thiokol engineers, Alan McDonald, who we just heard from, and Roger Beaujolais. Now, Beaujolais led that 11th hour effort to wait for warmer temperatures. McDonald testified that Thiokol was pressured by NASA to approve the launch. Beaujolais told the commission he'd been part of a special task force at Thiokol, that was focused on the O-ring problem for a long time in advance of Challenger.

21:27In fact, he wrote a memo six months before the Challenger launch that warned of a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life, if the O-ring issue wasn't fixed. It's hard to imagine a more powerful warning. Like, people are going to die if you don't fix this. So why, with disaster like that predicted, did shuttle flights continue, especially in freezing weather? Some people say this was due to something called the normalization of deviance. That's a phrase coined by sociologist Diane Vaughn in 1996 after she studied the Challenger disaster. And simply put, this is what it means. when a threat is recognized and defined, and even when it begins to be addressed.

22:16As long as nothing disastrous results in the meantime, decision makers tend to continue to operate despite that ongoing threat. So Howard, when did you and your NPR colleague Daniels Werdling begin to investigate this? About three weeks after the disaster. You know, I was based in Utah in 1986, and I had heard a brief local news story which said that Thiokol was coerced into approving the launch. So I made a few phone calls. That resulted in a tip and a name, Bob Ebling. I called Ebling at home, and he answered, but he said, don't quote me, don't name me. No, I don't want to do an interview. They'll fire me.

22:58But Ebling was clearly upset as he confirmed that Thiokol was coerced, that was his word, into approving the launch. Then two other Thiokol engineers were named in news stories, Alan McDonald and Roger Beaujolais. Bits of their closed-door Challenger Commission testimony leaked. It was February 19th then, 22 days after the tragic launch, and that's the day I teamed up with my NPR colleague Daniel Zwirdling. So what did you and Zwerdling do exactly to find out those things that weren't public yet, like those unreported details of the failed effort to stop the launch? Zwerdling had learned that Thiokol engineer Roger Beaujolais was in a hotel room near the Marshall Spacelight Center in Alabama, so he hopped on a plane.

23:45At the same time, I drove to Brigham City where most of the Thiokol workers lived, and I went right to the public library. So now, I mean, why did you go to the public library? Like, what was up with that? Remember, this was 1986. We didn't have laptops or the internet or Google to search for home addresses and phone numbers. We had names of Thiokol engineers and executives. So I poured through telephone books stacked in the public library to get their home addresses and phone numbers. I then drove around Brigham City knocking on doors. One door opened at Bob Ebling's house. But Ebling wouldn't talk to you like on the phone when you had called earlier.

24:28So why did you think he would talk to you that day? Is it different when you're in person? Like, you know, as a reporter, reporter, it's different when you show up at the house. Well, you know, we reporters like to say that 90 % of journalism is showing up. Because like you say, when you show up face to face, often that has more impact than phoning somebody. when it's much easier to just simply say no and hang up. So I showed up. I did ask Ebling 30 years later why he decided to talk to me that day in 1986. That's my engineering background coming out. Somebody should tell the truth. I think the truth has to come out.

25:12But getting to that truth in 1986 wasn't easy. First, I got into the house because Ebling wasn't home from work yet, and his wife Darlene let me in. You know, in 1986, we didn't have cell phones, and I hadn't talked to my NPR editor in Washington for hours. So I asked Darlene Ebling if I could use their phone, and she said yes. After checking in with my editor, Darlene offered me some water. She was friendly and hospitable, and we sat at the kitchen table and chatted. And so you stayed in Bob Ebling's kitchen until he got home? I did. You know, I wasn't asked to leave. And if I had been asked to leave, I would have left.

25:54But, you know, we sat there and talked until Bob Ebling got home. And he was not happy to see a reporter sitting at his kitchen table. But he was also still frantic. He paced back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, wringing his hands. shaking his head and complaining that Thiokol was unfairly blamed for the Challenger explosion. And then he unloaded. He started to give me a detailed account of what happened the night before the launch. He had direct quotes with names. And again, don't record me, he insisted. Don't name me. But he agreed to let me report what he was saying anonymously.

26:35And here's an excerpt from my story the next morning. So this is February 20th, 1986 on NPR's Morning Edition. Last night he read in the local newspaper that Vandal scrawled a phrase three feet high across a railroad overpass. Morton Thiacall murderers, it said. The engineer shakes his head, rises and walks into another room to watch a television report, but turns away when that haunting image is shown again. I should have done more, he says. I could have done more. I'm Howard Berkus in Brigham City, Utah. I mean, so that's Bob Ebling blaming himself for the disaster, for the deaths of these seven astronauts, including the teacher, Krista McAuliffe.

27:25That has to be such a burden to carry. So what about his colleague, Roger Beaujolais in Alabama? What was he saying? Beaujolais wouldn't open his hotel room door, at least at first, but he and Daniel Zwerdling talked through the door and Zwerdling could hear Beaujolais sobbing. And Zwerdling told him the world wouldn't learn the truth unless he opened up. And he finally did. Now, neither of us knew it at the time, but Zwerdling was getting the same story I was hearing at Bob Ebling's kitchen table. The same details, the same names, some of the same direct quotes. And when we finally checked in with each other later in a conference call that we had with our editor, we discovered how identical these accounts were.

28:12We knew we had a powerful untold story. When we come back, how that story revealed what really happened behind the scenes as the launch neared. FIA Call Executive Bob Lund wraps up their presentation to NASA with the company's official recommendation. Do not launch the shuttle tomorrow. Stay with us.

28:45We're back with a Sunday story, And I'm speaking with retired NPR reporter Howard Berkus. Howard, you had two unnamed sources back in 1986. They weren't on tape. Was there any hesitation at NPR about going with the story with those sources not named? There was. You know, the general ethical policy at NPR back then was pretty simple. Don't quote unnamed sources unless you have three of them confirming the same story. And we only had two. So I was sent back out to knock on more doors in Brigham City, while Zwerdling wrote what was essentially a play-by-play, a story with a minute-by-minute account of what we both had learned from Beaujolais and Ebling.