NASA rocket managers on Friday disputed the conclusion of a presidential commission that the decision process leading to the space shuttle Challenger`s doomed cold-weather launch was ”clearly flawed.”
They also wondered aloud why engineers from Morton Thiokol Inc., maker of the shuttle solid-fuel booster rockets, were not shouldering more of the blame for the fatal accident.
”In my judgment, the process was not flawed,” declared William Lucas, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA`s rocketry headquarters and a prime focus of commission concerns.
Lucas and four other top shuttle managers here took issue with the conclusion by the commission chairman, former Secretary of State William Rogers, who said Thursday that the space agency had eliminated ”the element of good judgment and common sense” in the process that led to Challenger`s disastrous launch on Jan. 28.
In fact, they tried to move the spotlight away from officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration`s Alabama rocket facility and more onto Morton Thiokol managers and engineers.
All five essentially repeated their testimony, given over three days of public hearings in Washington before the Rogers panel, that they had been unaware Morton Thiokol engineers continued to unanimously oppose the launch even after company management overruled them.
The Morton Thiokol engineers said they feared the record cold would cause rubber seals in the seams of the booster rocket to fail. After lengthy telephone conferences on the night of Jan. 27 between NASA and Morton Thiokol just hours before the launch, company executives overruled their engineers to approve the launch, testimony showed.
In Houston, NASA official Jesse Moore, who gave the final order to launch the shuttle, said he is not ready to agree that NASA`s decision-making process is flawed.
”I`m not throwing in the towel and saying the process is bad. I`m not prepared to make any judgments on changing the process. We all believe the process is a good process,” Moore told reporters. Moore took over Friday as the director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
A source familiar with the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster said commission members ”expressed surprise at Marshall`s comments, saying it was curious . . . in light of the facts. And that kind of comment underscores what is clearly a fundamental problem with the decision-making process.”
The commission met in private sessions Friday and formed four working groups to study different aspects of the investigation, including the first formal look at pre-launch safety.
At Huntsville, several Marshall officials expressed misgivings over how the commission was conducting its investigation and the resulting publicity.
”I would have certainly preferred that the commission conduct its investigation in a manner that, for example, the military conducts
incidents,” said Stanley Reinartz, manager of the shuttle projects office.
”. . . When they get done, they issue the total report.
”And I think the working of this situation through the commission would have assisted in a total, a more complete and balanced investigation, in my opinion,” Reinartz said.
Lawrence Mulloy, director of the solid rocket booster program, said he didn`t understand Rogers` criticism of the decision-making process. ”I`ve puzzled over that, and it`s just absolutely not clear to me what Chairman Rogers, his distinct understanding of what the flaw is,” he said.
Lucas was asked about internal Morton Thiokol memos warning last year that failure of the rubber O-ring gaskets used to prevent 5,800-degree gases from burning through the rocket joints would be catastrophic for a shuttle and crew.
”The level from which those memos came (within Morton Thiokol) would normally not have come to the Marshall Space Flight Center,” Lucas said.
”Let me say that I don`t know that the (Morton Thiokol) executives saw them, either, but someone saw those memos and should have not stopped the memo that suggested there was a safety problem without passing them on.”
Engineers for Morton Thiokol testified this week that they opposed launch because they feared the cold would inhibit the O-rings from expanding to fill the crucial gap in the rocket seams. A failure of one of those joints is the prime suspect in Challenger`s explosion.
But Lucas declared that, based on what his subordinates have told him,
”I think it was a sound decision to launch. So far as I know . . . my people did not know of the feelings of certain Thiokol engineers that have been expressed in recent days to the commission.”
”Looking back over it, the process (in reaching the decision to launch)
was the same, and I`m willing to wait until I find out what the facts are before I would indicate whether the right judgment was used or not,” he said. In separate meetings with reporters, two other NASA officials at Marshall joined Lucas, Reinartz and Mulloy in disputing contentions brought out at the commission hearings that NASA`s launch decision was flawed or that there was a change in NASA`s traditional attitude that contractors must prove a launch is safe. They were Judson Lovingood, deputy manager of the shuttle projects office, and George Hardy, deputy director of science and engineering.
Lovingood said he felt some responsibility personally for the disaster.
”Yes, I think I do,” he said, but added, ”I feel I did everything that I should have done, and I feel like the rationale we had for safe flight was a valid rationale.
”And I don`t like this discussion which seems to have been picked up,”
he added. ”There was no reversal in the process” of safety-first.”
As NASA officials defended their decision-making process in Huntsville, a Morton Thiokol spokesman in Chicago said he had ”no problem” with their characterization that they were unaware of the ”lingering” opposition to the launch from Morton Thiokol engineers following the Jan. 27 teleconference.
Citing testimony presented to the presidential commission this week by Morton Thiokol engineers and management officials, Morton Thiokol spokesman Thomas Russell asserted that the testimony indicated that the engineers`
objections to launching ”were not as vocal at the teleconference” as reported in the news media in the weeks following the fatal shuttle explosion. Roger Boisjoly, Morton Thiokol`s leading seal expert, said in testimony this week that he had expressed ”deep concern” during the teleconference because he knew the cold weather could decrease the effectiveness of the O-rings.
Allan McDonald, the Morton Thiokol senior engineer at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, told the presidential commission that he warned NASA officials that ”I sure wouldn`t want to be the person that had to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain” a decision to launch.
Boisjoly, reached Friday by telephone in Utah, declined further comment. McDonald could not be reached for comment.
