posted 02-18-2007 08:09 AM               

Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age

On January 28, 1986, NASA launched shuttle mission 51-L, despite concerns about the freezing weather that had arrived in Florida overnight. Seventy-three seconds into the launch, Challenger exploded, killing seven people and leaving the world to wonder and mourn.

Six months earlier, Richard C. Cook, the lead resource analyst at NASA for the solid rocket boosters, had written a memo that warned of catastrophic failure, based on meetings with headquarters engineers. The warnings were ignored by NASA officials, who refused to stop shuttle flights despite escalating concerns within the agency and Morton Thiokol, the booster contractor.

In the aftermath of the explosion, NASA launched an investigation to "discover" its cause. Though within NASA there was certainty about the O-ring joint failure in a solid rocket booster, they publicly proclaimed that the cause of the explosion was unknown. A Reagan administration Presidential Commission seemed determined to protect NASA from criticism. When Cook realized that a cover-up had begun, he leaked a series of O-ring warning documents to the New York Times. This set off a cascade of disclosures about the events leading up to the disaster, including revelations by Morton Thiokol engineers that they had tried to stop the launch.

Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age is Richard C. Cook's personal story of how he disrupted the cover-ups surrounding the Challenger disaster. Challenger Revealed identifies a complex web of underlying causes for the catastrophe, including the militarization of the manned space program, a right-wing coup that subverted NASA's leadership, chronic insufficient funding, use of the Teacher-in-Space program as a publicity prop, and top-down command-and-control management.

Cook's narrative contains a host of details never before published, including his meetings with the New York Times, accounts of crucial meetings he attended at NASA before the disaster, as well as documents from the National Archives showing how the Commission covered up the White House involvement. With a stunning ending, Challenger Revealed is the only book published on the Challenger disaster by an insider who participated in the events.

posted 02-19-2007 10:12 AM               

• the stuff about the Challenger accident is not really new.
  
• the author is spinning a conspiracy when nobody else has found evidence of one.
  
• the political stuff is total BS. There are really NO connections between Challenger and the SDI program at the time, and I think that the author is twisting his argument into a pretzel in order to make connections that are not there.

posted 02-19-2007 04:52 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Dwayne Day:
I read a longer blurb about this by the author. Without reading the book, my quick assessment is this

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posted 02-19-2007 05:07 PM               

I have actually seen this before. This morning I was listening to C-SPAN radio (for non-Americans, C-SPAN is a cable TV network that covers political issues. It is non-partisan and frequently broadcasts congressional meetings. I was listening to a radio broadcast of one of their book discussion programs). They had on an author talking about Abraham Lincoln because today is President's Day in the US. These book discussion programs on C-SPAN are always the same: the authors are fascinating and about 80% of the people who call in are nuts or partisan windbags.

Anyway, even though the subject was a president who has been dead for 140 years, a lot of people kept bringing up the Iraq war. It didn't matter if the subject was history, lots of people wanted to merge their current political views with the subject.

I get that impression about this guy's book. Rather than write a history, he has some current issues that he wants to discuss as well.

posted 02-19-2007 07:55 PM               

We addressed the Cook Memoranda in our Challenger DVD set. He was an analyst who was addressing the impact the solid rocket booster problem could have on the budget, and not so intimately involved so far as the commission could tell. We included his testimony and it deserves watching for its context in the overall investigation.

In this age of celebrity worship and book deals on anything remotely titilating, it doesn't surprise me that this would be created.

I found absolutly no evidence that the Rogers commission did anything to protect the administration... indeed, look at the members of the commission. I challenge anyone to find someone who could influence Neil Armstrong or Richard Feynman (and several others, notably one of my favorites on the commission General Donald Kutyna) to be their patsies. This commission didn't exactly sugar-coat its findings.

posted 02-20-2007 10:31 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by spacecraft films:
This commission didn't exactly sugar-coat its findings.

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posted 02-28-2007 09:36 PM               

Additionally, I just went back and looked at your testimony before the commission and have a couple of questions. First, given the above it states "When Cook realized that a cover-up had begun, he leaked a series of O-ring warning documents to the New York Times." During your testimony (which I believe was under oath) you were asked if you had ever given any of your memos to anyone outside your organization. Is there a reason why you said you did not?

Later in your testimony you were asked if you were confident that now with the work of the commission that the accident would be fully and openly investigated and you replied yes, that you were glad it was occuring in public and agreed that it was being investigated, your only suggestion being that the commission talk to a wide variety of engineers working on the boosters (which from their witness list, mainly in other sessions, they did). What changed your opinion from then to 21 years later?

I am also interested in why a commission that you say above "seemed determined to protect NASA from criticism" absolutely grilled the folks from Marshall on the January 26 launch decision?

posted 02-28-2007 10:26 PM               

I don't know if you have seen the articles I have written since the book was published on LewRockwell.com and bartcop.com or the article in the Washington City Paper entitled "Shuttle Rebuttal."

If you want more context on my testimonry to the Rogers Commission on February 11 and the pressures I was under, as well as where Chairman Rogers and the NASA participants were coming from in their statements that day, you need to read the book in its entirety, including the summary of that hearing in Chapter 15.

Lastly, I would say that every person involved in the disaster, myself included, did the best they could under the circumstances we were all in, from the perspective we were seeing things from.

In the book I tried to reflect this broader picture and the tragic nature of these events.

posted 03-19-2007 08:45 AM               

I read two of the chapters in the middle of the book related to the alleged conspiracy concerning the Challenger accident. These dealt with the alleged connections to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and the claim that NASA was pressured by the White House because Reagan wanted to discuss Christa McAuliffe during his State of the Union Address. I also looked closely at the footnotes.

For a book that claims to contain controversial information about the Challenger accident, it is very thinly sourced and shows little indication of primary source research such as interviews and archival and documentary research. Most of the sources are secondary, usually books or articles in magazines, and there are no solid sources provided to support the most serious allegations. The book relies upon Joseph Trento's rather old (and many consider muckraking) book Prescription for Disaster for many pieces of information rather than on some newer works or documentary sources. Instead of firsthand interviews with the people involved, the author repeatedly cites people such as journalists that he talked to who told him that things had happened. Why didn't he talk directly to the participants themselves? If his only source that a meeting took place is a CNN producer and not somebody who was there, then how do we know that the meeting actually took place? How do we know that the story did not get distorted in the retelling? How come the CNN producer did not write the book? The author also repeatedly cites "author's notes" as a source. But this is not really a source. It's like putting "I say so" in a footnote. What _are_ those notes? What do they refer to? As a form of citation, this is essentially useless. It is circular. I cannot go to an archive or a person and follow-up on the subject. All I have is the author's say-so. There are thousands of documents available on the Challenger accident. Yet there is no evidence in the book that the author used documents at NASA Headquarters, the National Archives, or other places. Nor is there any evidence that the author used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documentation on subjects such as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

I think that this is a key point. If you are going to make serious charges, such as conspiracy and coverup, then you have to support those charges with solid evidence, such as documents and interviews that people can check, not use what is essentially hearsay evidence. Simply put, there is no solid, checkable evidence to support these allegations.

The section on how conservative politicians allegedly took over NASA is also rather odd. It is rather breathless, implying sinister motives (as if being a "conservative" is a bad thing). Now that line of argument might work with people who have a liberal point of view, but it is not an effort to be an objective and unbiased reporter of events -- it starts from a partisan position. The author essentially starts with the view that the Strategic Defense Initiative was evil, therefore any efforts to get NASA to support more SDI missions in the 1980s are portrayed as evidence of something sinister.

The author frequently refers to the "Conservative Movement" or "Movement" in capital letters, as if it was some kind of sinister conspiracy or cult. However, there are other examples of odd editing, such as a comment that one person had been an expert in "nuclear weapons 'effects'" (note the quotation marks) as if the word "effects" required separate quotation marks because it's not a legitimate term. I noticed other odd uses of capitalized words. Normally that would merely indicate poor copy-editing (a good copy editor has no higher calling than to attack the gratuitous use of quotation marks), but it is also a characteristic of conspiracy screeds.

posted 03-19-2007 01:21 PM               

The book absolutely oozes the conservative=evil viewpoint, which, I suspect, is the reason it was published, and published now. He starts in the introduction and never strays very far from this theme.

posted 03-19-2007 04:06 PM               

It is also true that Marshall engineers rejected the design when it was first put forward and tested. At some point it was decided to proceed.

posted 03-19-2007 05:15 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by spacecraft films:
I read the whole book. You summed it up well.

The book absolutely oozes the conservative=evil viewpoint, which, I suspect, is the reason it was published, and published now. He starts in the introduction and never strays very far from this theme.

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I should have read the introduction, but the chapter on conservatives and NASA (with a title something like "We will be able to control the universe!" had several traits that are common to conspiracy publications. A common one is that the author forgets that the reader does not automatically share his identical worldview and also is not going to automatically see the connections between events. Thus, the author will say "See, this happened, and then THAT happened, and _of course_ you know what that means?!"

Meanwhile the reader sits there looking puzzled and replies "er... no, I don't see the connection..." and the writer gets more and more frustrated because in his opinion, the connections are obvious.

(Although I said that this trait is common to conspiracy writing, the conspiracy does not have to be big for the writer to commit this flaw. Many years ago I was reviewing a manuscript where an author claimed that the killing of a piece of legislation proved that nefarious forces were being nefarious. I kept pointing out to the editor and writer that hundreds of pieces of legislation get introduced every year and killed, and most of the time that happens not for nefarious purposes, but because that is the way Congress works. I kept insisting that if the author was going to allege pressure to kill the legislation, then he needed to _prove_ it, not simply assume that the readers would automatically make the connection. Ultimately, the book never got published because of lapses in logic like this.)

Anyway, back to our story...

The chapter on conservatives and the SDI program was filled with stuff like this. We're told that so and so met with three other people in a Georgetown restaurant and because of that, people got fired and policies got implemented and reputations were destroyed. But the fact that some people had a meeting is not in itself sinister. What exactly did they discuss? Of course, you don't know that until you talk to one of them (and preferably more).

The whole tone of the book was like this. If the reader is predisposed to believe in a vast conservative conspiracy to do bad things to NASA, then they're going to connect the dots and (maybe) conclude that evil things happened. For those of us who are agnostic on the issue, that won't happen.

posted 03-19-2007 07:46 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Dwayne Day:
The book relies upon Joseph Trento’s rather old (and many consider muckraking) book Prescription for Disaster for many pieces of information rather than on some newer works or documentary sources. weak and unsubstantiated.

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posted 03-20-2007 08:22 AM               

It's been a long time since I read that book. My main concern is that any new book on Challenger should not really rely upon it that heavily.

posted 03-20-2007 09:56 PM               

But almost all of the books I've found were done not long after the accident -- there was Trento, and Malcolm McConnell's "Challenger: A Major Malfunction," plus the quickly-produced "Challengers" paperback that the Washington Post put out in 1986. (I'm not including the handful of astronaut biographies, such as "I Touch The Future," in this sum.) All these books are readable, but they're products of their times and the information available then, and sort of limited in that regard.

Diane Vaughan's "The Challenger Launch Decision" is highly informative, but it's an academic press book and can be hard to access (heck, I've got a Ph.D. and I'm having trouble following parts of it. Plus, when you look at it, it's a book about how organizations work and how decisions get made, using the Challenger decision as a case study).

posted 12-30-2007 02:05 AM               

Randy simply tells the story from his perspective as a NASA engineer working at KSC, who got tagged to help with the reconstruction of the orbiter vehicle during the investigation, simply because he wasn't directly involved with the pipeline flow of Challenger for STS-51L (He was working on Columbia for the STS-61C at the time). He covers it from that angle and tends to stick with it and doesn't delve into partisan politics. He does cover one bit of the infamous Reagan State of the Union speech controversy and that the White House supposedly put undue pressure on NASA to launch that day. His conclusion was he couldn't find anything about that as the speech writers only had one line that mentioned it and had a couple drafts of the speech (one with mention, one without).

You won't find any smoking gun in this book. What you will find is a good account of what happened during the investigation. He does address certain more controversial aspects of the Rogers Commission final report concluding the accident wasn't due to the O-Rings though and his logic is valid. If it really was the O-Rings, then why did NASA spend millions on booster redesign? If O-rings were the culprit, simply fly with new O-rings, right? Well, the entire SRB booster joint was flawed and flexing too much under pressure, meaning the O-rings were called upon to do things they were never intended to do and became the scapegoats in the process.

posted 12-30-2007 09:52 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Jay Chladek:
If O-rings were the culprit, simply fly with new O-rings, right?

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posted 12-31-2007 03:04 PM               

Marshall knew about the possibility of "joint rotation" from their early testing in 1977 and that has been documented elsewhere. With the way the joints were designed, the O-rings would pull away from the upper joint segment's tab and were no longer able to hold in the asbestos putty (the actual fire proofing material used to hold back the hot gases). The cold exacerbated the malfunction by weakening the O-rings. But if the joints didn't have the flex problem in the first place, then even a cold O-ring should have held up as it would have been fully seated in its cavity.

If I read it right, then an O-ring operating normally would have still sealed the putty during joint flex (from 0.0042 to 0.006 of an inch), although it becomes the weak link in the chain with nothing to back it up if there is a problem with it (such as cold making it brittle). There was evidence of O-ring blow by on several previous launches, but Challenger's just happened to be at the worst possible spot, the aft field joint near the ET attachment struts. Engineering disasters are like that. Break one link in the chain and nothing happens. Stack them all together, problem.

posted 12-31-2007 06:16 PM            

"Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: The Real Story of the Challenger Accident" by Allan McDonald and James Hansen