Challenger Catastrophe

I read your editorial (Feb. 28), “Tracking a Tragedy,” with a great deal of interest.

In the mid-1960s, I was the reliability and quality assurance engineer for a NASA subcontractor, working on the manned spacecraft program. NASA imposed rigid specifications and requirements on all contractors, subcontractors and suppliers covering critical review of hardware designs at several levels prior to release for manufacture, and comprehensive qualification test requirements of components, subassemblies and completed assemblies under conditions of low and high temperatures, vibration, low atmospheric pressures and other environmental parameters in attempts to simulate the environmental profiles to which the spacecraft would be subjected.

Parts or materials that failed to perform properly during test were subjected to detailed failure analysis to determine cause of failure in order that necessary corrective action could be implemented.

Central to the design reviews, even in the early conceptual reviews, was a carefully documented program of “failure-mode and effects analysis.” Engineers would attempt to determine the manner in which things might fail and then assess the effect of such failures upon mission success and crew safety.

I think that if the records of the design reviews and the failure modes and effects analyses for the spacecraft boosters were reviewed, one would find many objections all the way back to the introduction of the concept of the segmented booster, warning about the hazards of that design, which attempts to seal off 6,000-degree gases with rubber “O” rings. I think there would also be a trail of sidetracked careers of some conscientious engineers who attempted to keep what has to be a fundamentally bad design out of our space program.

JOHN A. RICE SR.

Huntington Park