Engineers Who Fought Launch Given New Jobs
Two Morton Thiokol Corp. engineers who opposed the ill-fated launching of the Challenger space shuttle last January have been assigned to new jobs, and investigators have questioned whether they were being punished for their role in the presidential inquiry into the tragedy.
Testifying before a closed session of the Challenger investigating commission, Allan J. McDonald and Roger Boisjoly said they had been moved into assignments where they no longer have direct dealings with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“I was not demoted,” McDonald said. “They just took my people away and gave me a more menial job, as far as I was concerned.”
McDonald and Boisjoly’s latest testimony on May 2 was made public Saturday.
‘They Should Be Promoted’
The two engineers were involved in the disclosure that a protracted telephone conference debate took place the night before the Challenger disaster, with working-level Thiokol engineers opposing the launching in record-cold temperatures, and company executives and space agency officials finally overruling them.
Commission Chairman William P. Rogers called the suggestion of retaliation against the engineers “shocking” and told Thiokol Vice President J. C. Kilminster: “It would seem to me, just speaking for myself, they should be promoted, not demoted or pushed aside.”
The Challenger disaster on Jan. 28 claimed the lives of seven crew members. Investigators have placed the blame on a leak in a joint of one of the Thiokol-built solid rocket boosters, but Rogers also has denounced what he called a “flawed” NASA decision-making process.
A month after the tragedy, McDonald, who was at Kennedy Space Center in Florida during the heated discussion the night before the launch, told the commission: “I made the direct statement that if anything happened to this launch . . . I sure wouldn’t want to be the person who had to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why I launched this.”
Boisjoly quoted Thiokol Executive Vice President Gerald Mason as telling a subordinate objecting to the launch to “take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.”
A week after McDonald and Boisjoly asserted that they had been sidelined, Maj. Gen. Donald J. Kutyna, a commission member, also warned Thiokol executives that “there is certainly some impression that these gentlemen have been punished or lowered in their responsibilities as a result of their proceedings since the accident.”
‘Haven’t Demoted Anyone’
Thiokol Vice President Ed Garrison disputed the suggestion, telling Kutyna: “We haven’t demoted anyone. We’ve changed a lot of duties, but we haven’t demoted anyone.” As the commission made public the proceedings of its final session, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center continued a shake-up of the management responsible for the shuttle’s solid rocket booster program, and the embattled space agency prepared to turn the reins over to a new administrator.
Late Friday, Marshall officials announced that Lawrence B. Mulloy, manager of the solid rocket booster project office, would become assistant to the director of the center’s Science and Engineering Directorate. It was the third move by an official who played a major role in the decision to go ahead with the Challenger launch.
Earlier, Stanley R. Reinhartz, who made the decision not to inform top NASA officials of the Thiokol engineers’ reservations about the launch, moved to the center’s special projects office. George Hardy, Marshall’s deputy director for engineering, who had told the Thiokol engineers he was “appalled” at their recommendation against launching, recently took early retirement.
On Monday, NASA will fill its top post, which has been vacant since shortly after the accident. In ceremonies at the White House, President Reagan will swear in James C. Fletcher, who headed the agency at the time the space shuttle development program was launched in 1972, for a second tour as administrator.
Report Due June 6
The presidential commission’s report is due on Reagan’s desk June 6.
At the May 2 closed session, their last hearing before turning to writing the report, the commissioners focused anew on NASA’s decision-making process for launching and also questioned the pace of the redesign work on the faulty solid rocket boosters.
Saturday, as it released the transcript of the session, the commission also made public documents showing that NASA had listed problems with the rubber-like O-rings, which seal the solid rocket booster joints, as a “constraint” against launch because hot gases had eroded the primary ring on several flights, suggesting the danger of a leak.
Still, just five days before the Challenger launch, the O-rings were taken off the launch constraint list in the Problem Assessment System, which was used to keep track of problems requiring solution or waiver before launch. A notation on a document at Marshall read: “This problem is considered closed.”
Mulloy told the commission, however, that there was no intention of closing the books on the O-ring design and the charring of O-rings on seven shuttle flights.
Problems Caused Concern
“It’s very unfortunate that that was erroneously entered,” he said. “I had no intention of closing that problem, because I considered this to be a very serious problem.”
Documents released by the commission showed that the number of outstanding items on the list of problems with the solid rocket motor, or SRM, concerned NASA officials.
On Dec. 24, 1985, L. O. Wear, manager of the solid rocket motor office at Marshall, wrote Thiokol officials: “During a recent review of the SRM Problem Review Board open problem list I found that we have 20 open problems, 11 opened during the past 6 months, 13 open over six months, 1 three years old, 2 two years old, and 1 closed during the past six months. As you can see our closure record is very poor.”
Two weeks earlier, McDonald at Thiokol had written suggesting that a number of items, including the O-ring in the joint between the nozzle and aft segment of the solid rocket booster be taken off of the list of outstanding problems.
But in his appearance before the commission May 2, McDonald said there was no intention to push the problem aside, that it was being addressed by a full-time task force. Paring down the list, he said, was merely an effort to reduce paper work.
Fear NASA Moving Too Fast
Members of the commission expressed some concern in their final hearing that pressure may now be forcing NASA to move too quickly to remedy the design problem that led to the biggest disaster of the space age.
After hearing James E. Kingsbury, who is now being replaced as head of the redesign task force, report that segments of new rocket casings are already being forged and that new test motors might be available as early as December, commission member Arthur B. C. Walker Jr. expressed concern about pressure.
“I’m just very concerned,” he said, “that the pressure to get the system operating again is going to force an early decision on the design of the new joint and I’m just wondering how you anticipate that that will be resisted.”
Despite assurances from Kingsbury, commission sources said, members of the investigating panel subsequently went to acting NASA Administrator William R. Graham and shuttle chief Richard H. Truly and secured their commitment that a panel of outside experts would be brought in to oversee the space agency task force directing the redesign.
