Reading 05 — Challenger Disaster

I think the root causes of the Challenger disaster were mostly arrogance and impatience from NASA. After reading about the disaster, it is clear that they were dead set on launching on January 28th. They ignored the concerns brought up by Roger Boisjoly and his colleagues for months leading up to the launch, and even when they begged them to postpone the launch, they were still not listening because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. I do think there may be some truth to Edward Tufte’s argument that the data presented to try and prove why they shouldn’t launch was not easy to draw conclusions from. NASA was under a lot of pressure, so I’m sure that they were looking for concrete evidence as to why the launch should be postponed. However, as Boisjoly said in his call to the Roger’s Commission, “This was a meeting where the determination was to launch, and it was up to us to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was not safe to do so. This is in total reverse to what the position usually is in a preflight conversation or a flight readiness review. It is usually exactly opposite that.” No amount of external pressure should flip the script like this to where safety is not the number one priority. Because of this I place the blame almost entirely on NASA.

I think Roger Boisjoly was ethical in sharing this information with the public. 7 people lost their lives because of questionable decision making, and their families deserve to know the reason why it happened. Neither NASA or Morton Thiokol were going to admit what happened, so Boisjoly took matters into his own hands. These companies needed to accept the responsibility one way or another, so I see no issue in Boisjoly sharing the information.

I’m less sure of whether or not Morton Thiokol was justified in retaliating against Boisjoly. On one hand, he did break the rules and share sensitive information that is in direct breach of the contract he signed when he agreed to work there. However, Morton Thiokol has an ethical responsibility to admit what happened, but they failed at that. Therefore, I think they were in their rights to retaliate against Boisjoly, but if they were acting ethically they would have realized that he had the courage to do what they should have done in the first place and not punished him for that.

I think there are different ways to interpret the benefits of whistle blowing. For the individual doing the whistle blowing, I would almost certainly think that you would be very discouraged from doing it. Boisjoly’s life was ruined after the Challenger disaster, and although he found some solace later on he was kicked out of his profession and his personal life suffered. However, sometimes the matter at hand is too important to not be brought to light, and so I commend people like Boisjoly and Chelsea Manning who have the courage to expose important truths even though it will have negative consequences for their personal lives.