Challenging Decisions

The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster is a vivid memory for anyone alive at the time.  Though I was not born just yet, I have heard personal accounts from many people exhibiting their flashbulb memory on the subject.  It’s one of the events in American history where people remember exactly what they were doing at the time of the disaster.  The space shuttle program was still young and people were watching every rocket launch that they could.  As a result, the world watched as the shuttle unexpectedly disintegrated 73 seconds into the launch.  We all know that the catastrophic failure resulted from an O-ring malfunction after multiple launch delays in the January weather.  However, this could have been prevented.

The “whistleblower” in this case is Roger Boisjoly, who had warned NASA previously of possible catastrophic failure due to a combination of the O-ring and freezing temperatures.  Of course, NASA seemed to ignore any and all warnings that could delay the future of space travel. Their solution to this potential problem seemed to be “strap another O-ring on there as a backup and we will deal with this later”. Unfortunately, it already was too late and this ignorance is what led to the disaster.  Once the causes became public, NASA was looking at someone to point their finger at and blame for the loss of human life.  On the other hand, Boisjoly came out to the public and revealed that he had warned them about this.

I feel that Boisjoly was right in revealing his information to the public.  He felt that NASA was wronging everyone including themselves, so he told his story.  NASA is also a publicly funded organization, which may be another reason to do this.  Instead of them pointing their finger at him, he explained to the world how he indirectly predicted the disaster and it was the fault of his higher-ups.  In doing so, he was very brave and knew the consequences.  However, I don’t think he fully understood that it would destroy his career.  He’s not a hero, but rather a person cast out from NASA for “tattling”.  If he didn’t come out with this information, he would have lived with guilt his entire life.  Honestly it was a tough situation and one that he would have to live with for the rest of his life.  Above all, he was noticed by a community as their own hero.  He wasn’t thrown down in the flame of blame after the disaster; he stood up for himself and people commended him for it, just not the right people, for the sake of his career.

I can understand why NASA would be frustrated with him, since loss of human life is something that nobody wants to take credit for.  They felt as if he betrayed them by blaming the higher-ups of the company and not the engineers.  However, it is unethical to be frustrated in this way.  Even though it was an accident, the person who should take full responsibility is the one that give the order to launch after the sub-zero temperatures.  According to Boisjoly, he or she knew the consequences and did not want to delay their schedule.  Ironically, the space program was grounded for over two years after the incident.

Disasters like Challenger are very tragic, yet they teach us what not to do at the same time.  In the same vein as the Titanic disaster, we learn from our mistakes and figure out new safety techniques for everybody involved.  It’s hard to think about how the space program might have been different if Challenger had not exploded.  While the disaster would be avoided, it may have merely been delayed.  We will never know for sure.  If there is a positive from this situation, it would be the extra safety precautions that are taken with spaceflight to ensure a disaster like this never happens again.