By the time he took the call from Bill Graham on the first Sunday in February 1986, Dr. Richard Feynman was already a dying man. Seven years earlier, he had been diagnosed with a rare cancer for which the prognosis was bleak: inside his abdomen, doctors discovered a tumor the size of a melon that eventually enwreathed his intestines. Feynman had survived only after losing a kidney and his spleen and enduring two difficult surgeries; complications included a split aorta, and the transfusion of seventy-eight pints of blood. After that, he had been diagnosed with an equally rare and aggressive lymphoma, affecting his bone marrow. This time, the doctors were at a loss for solutions or explanations; Feynman refused to connect the development of two such unusual cancers with his work on the United States’ atom bomb project as a young man. But when the Acting Administrator of NASA had reached him at home in California with the invitation to join the Challenger investigation, he knew that the work would devour much of what little time he had left. “You’re ruining my life,” he told Graham.
At sixty-seven, the Caltech professor was a long-haired iconoclast whose recent memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! had proved an unexpected bestseller and made him as famous for his countercultural antics—playing the bongos, visiting topless bars, experimenting with marijuana and sensory deprivation—as he was for his genius as a theoretical physicist. Disdaining the formality and plaudits of academia, Feynman was less proud of his scientific achievements than his ability to penetrate trickery and artifice; but he was also a shrewd curator of his own myth. And once his wife convinced him that what the Challenger commission really needed was one renegade investigator prepared to head out on his own in the pursuit of answers, he threw the full weight of his intellect into the inquiry.
Before flying to Washington, DC, Feynman—whose expertise lay in quantum mechanics—used his connections at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to arrange an intensive briefing on the technology of the shuttle. From the JPL engineers, he heard in detail about the troublesome history of the main engines and the difficulties with the seals in the solid rockets—about how bubbles in the zinc chromate putty packed in the joints helped create jets of hot gas, and how these could damage the O-rings. On the first page of notes he scribbled during his briefing that day, Feynman wrote: O-rings show scorching in clevis check.… Once a small hole burns thru generates a large hole very fast! Few seconds catastrophic failure.
But once the meetings of the commission began, Feynman was frustrated by the pace of their work and the torpid inefficiencies of the hearings: he felt he had learned more in that initial briefing in Pasadena than he had from hours of circumlocutions from NASA officials. He itched to go out and question individual engineers himself; he found the information he received through formal channels utterly useless. During the closed hearing in which Al McDonald revealed Thiokol’s initial opposition to launch, Feynman asked the agency managers to provide him with detailed data about the resiliency of the O-rings at low temperature. Later that same afternoon, he received a thick stack of documents, reproducing the request at every level of NASA’s meandering bureaucracy. Sandwiched in the middle was a piece of paper containing an answer—not to the vital question of how the rubber rings would spring back into shape during the first milliseconds of the rockets’ ignition, but how they behaved over the duration of several hours.
But that night, during a dinner with Rogers and the other members of the commission inside the White House complex, Feynman looked down at the glass of ice water on the table before him and decided he didn’t need NASA’s engineers to help him understand the O-rings. He could do it himself, with his own experiment. All he needed was a sample of the rubber, and realized he could use a piece from inside the cutaway section of the solid rocket field joint the agency managers had been passing around during the hearings. When he took his seat on the panel the next morning, Feynman faced a packed auditorium lit by bright TV lights and a row of cameras. In the pockets of his jacket he had a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and a metal clamp he had found in the medical center at NASA headquarters.
According to Chairman Rogers’s strategy, the hearing would be devoted to testimony from Larry Mulloy—who would simply be repeating much of what he had said in the closed session the day before—and from the NASA budget analyst whose memos had appeared in the papers over the weekend. Rogers wanted to hold back all discussion of the cold temperatures at launch—and the Thiokol teleconference—until later in the week.
And, once Mulloy began to speak, the chairman told him to avoid dwelling on the weather. Instead, the Marshall engineer paced the floor with a wand-like microphone in his hand, working laboriously through the same presentation he had given once already: he described the Flight Readiness Review process and the rationale that lay behind acceptable risk; he detailed every possible scenario of O-ring damage in the solid rockets, and said that he had seen no evidence of erosion for a year, and they had no reason to believe that it was dangerous. For the first time, he admitted in public that cold temperatures could affect the sealing of the joints. But so far, he explained, it remained impossible to say whether the joints might be the cause of what he called the “51-L incident”; NASA’s temperature tests on the O-ring material were still continuing: the results would not be ready until later in the week.
But Feynman had heard enough: he was impatient to cut through Mulloy’s opaque jargon in a way the public could easily understand. At his seat, the physicist prepared the experiment: levering an inch-long piece of O-ring out of the steel channels in the cutaway model, he folded the rubber gasket over on itself and tightened it into the clamp; then he submerged the assembly in a Styrofoam cup filled with ice water, where the temperature hovered near freezing. During a recess, he approached Rogers to ask permission to conduct an on-camera demonstration. The chairman reluctantly agreed. When the meeting reconvened, Rogers gave Feynman the floor.
“This is a comment for Mr. Mulloy,” Feynman began, and reached into the cup for the clamp.
“I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it”—he leaned away from the table, giving the TV cameras an excellent view as he unwound the clamp and released the piece of O-ring—“it doesn’t stretch back.”
Like a seasoned illusionist, Feynman passed the sample to his left, as if Air Force General Donald Kutyna might affirm for the audience at home that seeing was believing.
“In other words, for a few seconds at least—and more seconds than that—there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees.
“I believe that has some significance for our problem.”
Two days after Feynman’s televised experiment, the members of the commission flew down to Florida aboard a pair of NASA planes for their hearings at the Cape. By now, the causes of the accident were swimming into focus, for both Rogers’s panel and the public: during testimony the next morning at the Kennedy Space Center, agency engineers revealed the photographs of black smoke escaping from the casing of Challenger’s right-hand solid rocket as it left the pad; afterward, NASA finally released the pictures to the press. And the next day, for the first time the commission planned to cross-examine the Morton Thiokol executives who had presided over the teleconference the night before the launch: Jerry Mason and Cal Wiggins; Bob Lund; and Joe Kilminster, who had put his signature on their recommendation to launch. The company had also flown in Al McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, who had both asked to appear. McDonald was certain that NASA had deliberately misled the commission about the prelaunch debate with Thiokol—and if he and Boisjoly didn’t stand up now and reveal the truth, it would never come out. McDonald had already made detailed notes about the teleconference, and believed them so important that he had left copies with a colleague in case his plane crashed on the way to the Cape. Meanwhile, in his motel room in Huntsville, Boisjoly had taken to sleeping with his packet of “smoking gun” memos beneath his pillow—and eventually grew so paranoid about what he knew that he feared his life might be in danger, and mailed an envelope of duplicates to his wife, with instructions to open it if anything should happen to him.
Following his unexpected intervention during the commission’s closed session at the beginning of the week, both the NASA officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center and his bosses from Thiokol were wary of what McDonald might disclose at the Florida hearing. Before the engineer arrived at the Cape, the two groups had coordinated what they planned to tell Rogers, and Larry Mulloy had given the strategy his approval. “Looks good,” he said, “if McDonald doesn’t throw another turd on the table.”
That night, Thiokol’s corporate chief of aerospace, Ed Garrison, gathered his staff for a briefing from the company lawyers in a conference room at a Ramada Inn near Merritt Island. They suggested a strategy used by the defense in criminal prosecutions, advising their clients to say as little as possible in their testimony, and to reply to questions with simple “yes” or “no” answers. But McDonald made clear he had no intention of holding back; he told the lawyers he planned to tell Rogers every last detail he could recall about the night before the launch. “I agree with Al, and I’m going to do the same thing,” Boisjoly said.
When the hearing began early the next morning, Chairman Rogers quickly stressed that he was only interested in hearing the complete truth. Before Thiokol Senior Vice President Jerry Mason began speaking, Rogers delivered a blunt warning: “Please disclose anything that you know about that may turn up,” he said. “If you have documents that we don’t know about that would be embarrassing to you, tell us about them now. We don’t want to have to pry information out of you… tell us the whole story, if you will.”
Almost immediately, the commissioners’ questions began to lay bare the false assumptions and failures that had lingered in the solid rocket program since its inception: how the engineers had thought the booster design was so similar to the ones flown for years by the Air Force that its reliability was assured; that the way the joint worked in practice was a potentially dangerous kludge that they didn’t fully understand; that no one had ever bothered to conduct meaningful tests at low temperatures until it was too late; that they had kept the shuttle flying regardless of a long series of ominous warnings. And, as the Thiokol executives described the progress of the prelaunch teleconference, their decision to change their recommendation from “no-go” to “go” came under scrutiny. Mason and Bob Lund told the panel that they guessed that there had been an even split among the engineering team about whether it would be safe to launch. But they admitted that they had never taken a poll to find out. At that point, Richard Feynman cut in to ask who among the Thiokol engineers were the most expert on the rockets’ seals.
“Roger Boisjoly and Arnie Thompson,” Bob Lund said.
“Mr. Boisjoly,” Feynman asked, “were you in agreement with the result of this caucus that it was OK to fly?”
“No, I was not.”
“Now, Mr. Thompson, were you in agreement, and so forth?”
“I was not,” Thompson said.
The two engineers went on to testify in detail about the information they had presented before the launch; they showed the panel their Viewgraph slides; hours passed. Rogers was openly bewildered by Mason’s convoluted account of how, after their recommendation to delay, he had changed his mind. “The impression is that you were directed to do it, that there was so much pressure to get this launch off the ground that you were directed to do it, and you did it,” he said. “Now, if that is not the case, try to explain it in language that the public would understand.”
Yet the Thiokol Vice President denied that any such direction had taken place. Neither he nor Larry Mulloy—or anyone else who had taken the stand that morning—would admit to having felt or applied pressure to alter the launch recommendation. The commissioners were astonished that, knowing everything they did about the history of the rockets and their own best-qualified engineers’ stated concerns, the Thiokol Vice Presidents chose to recommend a launch regardless.
“I mean,” Rogers said in exasperation, “that is just unbelievable to me.”
After almost four hours of testimony, the chairman was once again concluding the proceedings for the day, when Al McDonald spoke up. “Since I caused this meeting to come about,” he said, “I would like to testify, I guess.”
McDonald was torn. He knew how damaging what he planned to say would be, both to NASA and to Morton Thiokol: to people he had respected, and worked with for years; his testimony would endanger their jobs, the future of NASA and the company, and his own career. The faces of men in the room he recognized were clouding with anger and distress. But he wanted the full truth to come out—not just to make sure such an accident never happened again, but to settle his own conscience.
Taking the stand, McDonald spoke briefly, but without interruption and, at last, the entire story of the night of January 27 emerged: he told the panel about how he had opposed the launch, about the repeated arguments he had with Larry Mulloy, and the belligerent attitude the NASA project manager had displayed during the conference; McDonald described how upset he had felt about the decision to proceed, and how he had tried again and again to make Mulloy and Stan Reinartz see reason; he explained how he had given them further grounds to delay the launch—the rough seas, the ice on the pad—but had been told that those were not his concerns. Finally, he repeated the warning he had given them: that he would not want to have to stand up in front of an inquiry and explain why they had decided to fire the rockets in violation of NASA’s own launch parameters. His testimony made clear that Larry Mulloy had not been forthright with Rogers, and that the Thiokol executives were trying to protect their most valuable customer.
When McDonald finished, there was just one question—from Alton Keel, the commission’s executive director, Rogers’s right-hand man, and a trained engineer who had followed the shuttle program from the start.
“The inference, Mr. McDonald, from your testimony is that you were under pressure, perhaps unusual pressure, from NASA officials, to go ahead with the launch. Is that an accurate inference?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“And did I understand, too, that you did not sign off on this one?” Rogers asked.
“No, I did not.”
“Was that unusual?”
“I believe it was, yes.”
Emotionally exhausted, ashamed at being forced to admit how NASA and Thiokol had failed, and still distraught by the unnecessary deaths of seven Americans, when he stepped down from the stand McDonald found himself fighting back tears. As he walked to the door, Sally Ride rose from her seat to embrace him.
“God, that took a lot of guts,” she said.
That afternoon, McDonald and Roger Boisjoly boarded the Thiokol corporate jet in Titusville for the long flight home to Utah. The atmosphere in the cabin was venomous: neither Jerry Mason nor any of the other executives on board would speak to the two engineers. They rode in silence to Huntsville for refueling, where McDonald—unable to face his colleagues’ enmity any longer—decided to stop for the night. Almost as soon as he had checked into his motel room, the phone began to ring as reporters from all over the country called him for comment. Mystified at how they had tracked him down—let alone how they had so swiftly learned of his testimony before a closed hearing—he refused to talk.
In the meantime, Chairman Rogers had telephoned the White House to tell the President that the accident had not simply been a technical failure after all; it was human error of the most shocking kind: he suspected that the entire launch approval process had failed. The next day, Rogers issued a public statement formally rerouting the course of the inquiry. From now on, none of the NASA officials involved in the final recommendation to launch mission STS-51-L would be permitted to play an active part in the investigation. “In recent days,” the communiqué explained, “the Commission has been investigating all aspects of the decision-making process leading up to the launch of the Challenger and has found that the process may have been flawed.”
It was another humiliating blow for the agency; staff in Washington, DC, were stunned. Jesse Moore stepped down from his position a few days later; James Beggs—still on a leave of absence to defend himself on federal charges—would resign soon afterward.
Back on Merritt Island, the first shattered fragments of Challenger to emerge from the ocean had begun arriving at the Kennedy Space Center, concealed beneath olive-drab tarpaulins on the trailer of an 18-wheeled flatbed truck. Piece by piece, NASA engineers unloaded the wreckage and laid it out on a grid of four-foot squares marked with yellow tape on the floor of a three-story warehouse near the Vehicle Assembly Building—pieces of a colossal jigsaw that investigators hoped would provide the physical evidence of what had triggered the destruction of the most complicated machine in history. Supervising the effort to recover and analyze the debris was Bob Crippen, who had flown down from Houston in a T-38 within twenty-four hours of the accident and moved into a room in the same crew quarters building where the Challenger astronauts had spent their last night on Earth.
Devastated by the deaths of his friends, Crippen had spent hours after the accident in tears; he was as low as he had ever been. But he told himself that focusing on work was the best way of coping with his grief and—if he could help find and fix whatever had caused the accident so that the shuttle could fly again—of fulfilling the wishes of his lost colleagues. Taking an office in the Space Center headquarters building, Crippen had begun working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, rarely left the island, and wouldn’t return to Houston for months. Officially, he was answerable to senior NASA managers appointed soon after the disaster to run the investigation and ocean recovery from Kennedy; unofficially, nothing there happened without his approval. “Crippen calls all the shots,” one staff member told a reporter.
Work to recover the Challenger wreckage had begun as soon as the debris had ceased raining from the sky on January 28. That morning, the captain of the Coast Guard cutter Point Roberts had been keeping station seven miles offshore beneath the shuttle’s flight path, just as he had many times before, as part of a routine to keep the area clear of maritime spectators during launch. He and his crew watched in awestruck silence, awaiting orders, as pieces of the spacecraft splashed into the water around them for almost sixty minutes. Eventually, at around 1:30 p.m., he received instructions to head into the center of a floating debris field that by then stretched for miles in every direction across the surface of the Atlantic, the sunlit waves glinting with fragments of aluminum and heat-resistant tiles torn from the skin of the shuttle. The Coast Guard crew collected what they could, and the next afternoon the Point Roberts docked inside the closed perimeter of the US Navy submarine base at Port Canaveral carrying six hundred pounds of wreckage—most of it in pieces so small that it was almost impossible to determine what they might once have been. It marked the beginning of what would become one of the largest maritime salvage operations in history.
Joined by a growing flotilla of ships from the Navy and the Coast Guard—and including NASA’s two booster recovery vessels—within twenty-four hours the search had called in planes and helicopters to scour the surface of the sea from above, sweeping an area that ranged up the coast of Florida from Melbourne to St. Augustine, and eighty miles out to sea; Coast Guard jets equipped with surface-tracking radar took to the skies to scan 33,000 square miles of ocean, as far north as Savannah, Georgia. Meanwhile, the agency summoned help to the Cape from every corner of the United States: the Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage, Charles “Black Bart” Bartholomew, flew in from Washington, DC, to coordinate a search for submerged wreckage, while an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team arrived from Eglin Air Force Base to handle the volatile remains of the shuttle’s rocket propellants; and the head of the accident investigation bureau at the National Transportation Safety Board agreed to supervise a forensic examination of what they found.
Carried by wind and tide, the Challenger flotsam spread quickly; the crews of local scallop boats found fragments of wreckage in their nets, and pieces began washing up along the length of the Space Coast, where they were recovered by sightseers and local police officers assigned to help locate the debris. Meanwhile, a team of four astronauts was sent from Houston to comb the beaches for body parts. Late in the second day of the search, the crew of a Coast Guard ship recovered drifting objects apparently from Challenger’s crew cabin, including notebooks, a tape recorder—and a partially intact helmet, containing human remains. A large section of fuselage from the orbiter’s nose was unloaded in Port Canaveral soon afterward. In their Miami operations center, Coast Guard officers used a sophisticated computer program to model the wind and current around where they had picked up the debris, and locate its likely impact point on the surface of the ocean. They soon believed they had found the area where the Challenger cabin had come down, within a circle roughly a mile in diameter near the Hetzel Shoal buoy, in shallow water some sixteen miles northeast of the Cape.
But NASA’s official line remained that Challenger and its crew had been consumed by the explosion, their ashes scattered in the stratosphere, and the agency refused to release details of the salvage effort; after receiving a phone call from the Astronaut Office, a Coast Guard spokesman was convinced to keep the recovery of the cockpit debris secret, and lied about what he knew during a TV interview. Bob Crippen, since reviewing the film evidence of the spacecraft’s last moments, refused to believe that the crew compartment could have survived the conflagration. He tried to stifle discussion of recovering the remains of the astronauts, fearing it would give false hope to their bereaved relatives. When fellow astronaut Jim Bagian—a flight surgeon and qualified diver assigned to the underwater search effort—told him he expected to find the cabin on the seafloor, Crippen became angry.
“I don’t want to hear anybody say that again,” he said. “We are not going to talk about it anymore.”
By February 3, Crippen had determined the priority in which the Challenger debris would be recovered. First came the evidence of what had gone wrong: the lower parts of the right-hand solid rocket booster, where the black puffs of smoke and plume of flame had appeared; next, the same parts of the left-hand rocket, for comparison during the accident investigation, and the struts that had attached both boosters to the external fuel tank. Only after that would they focus on looking for whatever might be left of the crew compartment.
By February 7, the drifting debris from the shuttle had either sunk to the bottom or been carried away by waves and wind. Crippen gave his approval for the Coast Guard to call off their surface search, and Black Bart’s underwater work began in earnest. Tall, blond, and mustachioed, Captain Bartholomew was a soft-spoken Navy diver who liked to tell people that he had quit flight school because it bored him. His unit arrived at the Cape with experience in some of the world’s most complex deep-sea salvage expeditions—including the retrieval of a hydrogen bomb lost with a B-52 bomber that went down off the coast of Spain in 1966 and the search for the wreckage of the Korean airliner shot down by the Soviet air force over the Sea of Japan in 1983.
With the relentless coverage of the catastrophe in the press and TV news, and mounting pressure to uncover its cause, NASA was impatient for the more than 3 million pounds of Challenger debris to be found at once; but Black Bart’s approach was as patient and methodical as it always was. Using film footage and flight-tracking radar data the agency had recorded of the shuttle as it broke up and tumbled into the ocean, he established an initial search area encompassing 250 square miles, in a part of the Atlantic that lay astride the powerful currents of the Gulf Stream, and the water was anywhere from 70 to 1,200 feet deep. To locate potential pieces of wreckage, Bartholomew sent out ships equipped with side-scanning sonar—similar to the equipment that had been used the year before to finally locate the wreck of the Titanic—which sailed north to south along parallel overlapping tracks, as if they were mowing a lawn.
The acoustic signals from the sonar “fish” towed behind each vessel were recorded on board as maroon-colored traces on eight-inch-wide rolls of strip chart paper, revealing the size and position of unidentified objects on the seafloor. At the end of every day, the strip charts were carried by a small boat back to the shore for analysis by a civilian sonar expert sitting in one of two beaten-up trailers Black Bart used as his headquarters, parked onshore near Port Canaveral. Fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, the technician pored over the sonar plots, relying on a combination of expertise and intuition to mark what seemed most likely to be pieces of Challenger—instead of coral formations, or the wreckage of the scores of missiles launched from the Cape over the previous thirty years, which also littered the search area. He assigned an individual number to each contact he picked out, entered its location into a computerized database, and then passed them on to Bartholomew for further investigation: those in shallow water would be examined by Navy divers; the deepest contacts went to teams deploying remote-controlled robot submarines or manned submersibles.
On Sunday, February 16, the crew of the Johnson Sea Link II were nosing their small battery-operated submersible through 1,200 feet of water 43 miles east of the Cape, in search of a piece of wreckage known only as Contact 21. As the vessel moved slowly across the bottom, its video cameras at first captured nothing but an undulating desert of yellow mud, flecks of white sediment caught in the floodlights as they drifted past the submersible in the half-knot current. But then, looming out of the dark water, the crew caught sight of a crescent of white carbon fiber, embedded in the mud and frayed at the edges; nearby, they spotted twisted lengths of piping and a small, spherical tank lying on the seafloor. Seizing a small piece of the wreckage with the submersible’s manipulator arm, the crew carried it to the surface, where engineers from the Marshall Space Flight Center confirmed the details of what they had found: components from the aft skirt of Challenger’s right-hand solid rocket booster. The bottom-most section of the rocket, the piece provided no evidence of the cause of the accident; it had been forty feet from the joint where the telltale puff of black smoke appeared during liftoff. But it was a start.
At a press briefing at the Cape a few days later, Captain Bartholomew and the Air Force colonel coordinating the operation said they were confident they would eventually find everything they were looking for. “We’re hot on the trail of the most important items,” the colonel said. But they added that the recovery could take months: this was not an ordinary salvage expedition; they were treating the seabed like a crime scene.
Freed of its reliance on NASA for information, the work of the Rogers Commission was moving quickly. In the days following Allan McDonald’s startling testimony in Florida, Rogers reorganized his team to begin conducting its own investigation and present to the public what they had discovered in private session. The dozen members of the panel split up and headed to Cape Canaveral, Huntsville, and Thiokol in Utah to gather more information, ahead of a series of open hearings in Washington, DC. Chairman Rogers planned to put NASA and senior Thiokol management on the stand beside Allan McDonald, Roger Boisjoly, and the other engineers who had tried to stop the launch, and make public how their recommendations had been ignored.
In the meantime, leaks about what McDonald had already told the panel propelled him into the national spotlight: after the details were reported on the ABC evening news, the telephone at home in Ogden began ringing and barely stopped. The following morning, when his story appeared on the front page of the New York Times—“Rocket Engineer Describes Arguing Against Launching”—furious company Vice President Jerry Mason called him to his office to explain himself; later that day, two members of Congress staged an abortive attempt to have him appear before them and the rest of the nation’s press. To evade the journalists and camera trucks camped on the street outside the house, McDonald began sleeping at a neighbor’s home instead. And, as the media focused with growing intensity on Thiokol’s role in the accident, the reverberations could already be felt in Brigham City: on February 14, Jerry Mason informed staff at the Wasatch Division that he would be suspending manufacture of the Space Shuttle solid rockets indefinitely, leading to the first layoffs at the facility in almost twenty years. Two hundred employees would lose their jobs; others feared they would be next. The following week, demoralized men driving out to work at the Promontory plant noticed that someone had daubed graffiti in red fluorescent paint on the wall of a highway underpass.
In letters two feet high, it read MORTON THIOKOL MURDERERS.
Back in Houston, the families of the lost shuttle crew found themselves caught in the unrelenting grip of a personal trauma that had become a national spectacle. Weeks went by, but it remained almost impossible to turn on the TV or walk past a newsstand without a graphic reminder of the most harrowing moment of their lives: the images of Challenger’s destruction now used to illustrate news stories about William Rogers’s investigation, the future of the space program, or the search continuing in the waters off the coast of Florida. Each evening, the ships of the salvage flotilla returned to dock within the secure perimeter of the Trident submarine basin at Port Canaveral, where they were greeted by the Jetty Rats: a mob of reporters and photographers camped across the channel in a public park. In their pursuit of news about the progress of the deep-sea recovery—and, especially, any sign of the remains of the crew—the media’s attempts to pierce the blanket of secrecy shrouding the operation had become increasingly sophisticated. Using radio scanners to eavesdrop on ship-to-shore communications and night-vision optics to examine any wreckage brought into port under cover of darkness, the journalists’ hunt for a scoop grew ingenious and ruthless. Unconfirmed rumors and ghoulish details about what had been found on the seabed circulated in dockside gossip and in the bars of Cocoa Beach, and Black Bart was reported to hold court in his Holiday Inn hot tub at night, swigging beer and telling tales that would have left NASA officials aghast, had they heard them; but little ever made it into print.
The crew families traveled the country attending one commemorative event after another: George Abbey made sure that they could fly wherever they needed at government expense. But soon they found it hard to leave their homes without being recognized. The day after the televised memorial at the Johnson Space Center, Alison Smith and her sister went to buy new outfits for the next service and found a hush crept behind them through the mall, their unwelcome celebrity drawing silence along their path like a mournful train. Each of the families’ numbers was listed in the Houston phone book, and strangers began calling Jane Smith at home, wanting to talk to her about Mike, until the astronaut assigned to her as a Casualty Assistance Officer persuaded her to install an answering machine to screen incoming messages. Before the accident, Smith had worked a part-time job in a friend’s clothing store in nearby Seabrook, but afterward had to stop when her presence attracted so much attention that she couldn’t get anything done. No longer able to go grocery shopping, Jane instead sent Alison to buy food for the family, rewarding her with the value of any coupons she could redeem at the checkout. June Scobee had stopped watching TV or reading the papers; she knew little of William Rogers’s ongoing inquiry, and nothing of the machinations of Morton Thiokol executives. Heartbroken by the sudden loss of the partner who had steadied her through every stage of her life since high school, Scobee became too numb to support her two children. She stopped eating, and wandered the aisles of the supermarket in a forlorn daze: she would put a jar of Jif peanut butter—Dick’s favorite—in her cart before recalling that there was no one at home to eat it; she’d collapse, sobbing, to the floor.
By the beginning of the final week in February, Commission Chairman Rogers was ready to go public with three days of new hearings dedicated to interrogating the decision to launch. Day one would be devoted to testimony from Morton Thiokol; the second, to the cross-examination of Larry Mulloy and other NASA Marshall engineers; and on the third day, Rockwell staff would take the stand. As the day of their hearing approached, Jerry Mason and the Thiokol lawyers planned carefully what the company’s men would say as they faced questioning in front of the nation’s TV cameras. Preparing yet another stack of colored Viewgraphs and technical presentations with which to beat their audience into submission, by now Mason knew how damaging Al McDonald’s testimony could prove—and so organized the order of the presentations to discredit him in advance. Mason himself planned to appear first, followed by Bob Lund and Joe Kilminster. McDonald would speak last.
But Rogers had become convinced that some of those who had testified before him in the closed session were guilty of dissembling, or worse—and certainly of misleading a Presidential inquiry. If anyone was going to choreograph what happened next, it would be him. As Mason and the Thiokol team gathered in the Crystal City Marriott to rehearse their testimony the night before the hearing, they were interrupted by the delivery of a press release from the commission. The document listed the agenda for the following morning: the first speaker would be Allan McDonald. Thunderstruck, Mason screamed at the lawyers to fix it. But it was too late.
Summoning the Thiokol counsels to his hotel room, Rogers was frank:
“I’m not interested in anything but making a public scapegoat out of Larry Mulloy and Thiokol management,” he said. “The man has lied under oath. I have an American hero in Allan McDonald. This will be a public performance.”
The culmination of everything that the commission had uncovered in the weeks since the accident, the Washington, DC, hearings unfolded almost exactly as Rogers promised. With calm authority, McDonald opened the session by recounting his story in full from the beginning; he described the pressure Mulloy and the other NASA managers had exerted on Thiokol to approve the launch and his own attempts to stop them. The commissioners asked only a handful of questions, and treated him with more deference than they had even the most senior agency officials at the outset of the inquiry.
But then Jerry Mason took his turn under the hot TV lights. With most of his prepared remarks rendered redundant by McDonald’s narrative, the session quickly turned prosecutorial. Questioning the logic of Thiokol’s final recommendation to launch, the commissioners at first treated Mason’s answers with bewilderment, then mounting disbelief.
“The data was inconclusive, and so you said, ‘Go ahead!’ ” Sally Ride said. Richard Feynman made clear that Mason’s decision to overturn his engineers’ advice to postpone the flight had no empirical foundation; it had, instead, been a reckless gamble.
As the cross-examination continued, Mason’s composure faltered: he lost track of the questions; he waved his hands, struggled to answer, and leafed in desperation through his notes; camera shutters clattered like the rifle bolts of a firing squad. One after another, the members of the commission took aim at the condemned man; even Neil Armstrong proved merciless.
“Every launch has a risk, but you take that risk because something must be achieved,” General Kutyna said at last. “What was driving here? What caused you to go?” Mason couldn’t answer. Kutyna shook his head in exasperation and contempt. At the end of an agonizing hour, the Thiokol executive limped from the stand, his credibility in tatters.
That afternoon, Roger Boisjoly took his turn before the panel, and testified to his long months of attempts to fix the O-ring problems. He read aloud from his “smoking gun” memos, and recalled how, in the climactic teleconference, the Marshall engineers had said that they were “appalled” at his recommendation not to launch. Later, Thiokol engineering chief Bob Lund admitted that he had felt forced to invert NASA’s usual priorities: instead of proving that Thiokol’s rockets were safe to fly, he was being asked to show conclusively that they weren’t. When asked why he couldn’t simply have stuck to his original no-go recommendation and refused to bow to the pressure to make a “management decision,” Lund was quiet for a long time.
An uncertain smile swam across his face.
“That’s probably what I should have done,” he said.
Larry Mulloy took the stand once again the next day. He remained pugnacious and self-assured: he said he hadn’t been convinced by the Thiokol engineers’ warnings because their data didn’t seem coherent; and in the two years of problems leading up to the accident, issues with cold weather just hadn’t been an overwhelming concern. But this time, almost no one on Rogers’s panel appeared to believe him. And they seemed astonished that Mulloy had failed to make sure news of the debate reached the highest levels of the launch decision chain—or any of the astronauts. “Larry,” General Kutyna told him, “if this were an airplane, an airliner, and I just had a two-hour argument with Boeing on whether the wing was going to fall off or not, I think I would tell the pilot.”
The three days of hearings devoted to what Rogers called “possible human error” came to an end on February 27, almost exactly a month after Challenger disintegrated nearly nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean. By that time, the name of Morton Thiokol had become a byword for failure, and the painstakingly nurtured public image of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been demolished. The hours of often conflicting testimony and remorseless cross-examination had dispelled any lingering notion that the accident had been caused by an inexplicable technical failure—revealing instead a pattern of mismanagement and miscommunication at the highest levels of the agency. An organization that had, since its inception, boasted of its ability to manage extraordinary risk on the frontiers of technology and learn from its mistakes had instead overlooked a litany of clear warnings; the signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture bred by repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible. Seduced by their own mythos, and blind to the subtleties of engineering complexity that none of them fully understood, the nation’s smartest minds had unwittingly sent seven men and women to their deaths.
Arnie Aldrich and Jesse Moore, the two men responsible for giving the final approval to launch, came to face the commission once more near the very end of the third day of the hearings. As the questioning wrapped up, Chairman Rogers thanked Moore and Aldrich for their cooperation and, when he reached his conclusion, he spoke respectfully. His tone was warm, almost avuncular; but what he had to say was as damning for them as it was for the agency they represented.
“You will remember that I did say at one point that we thought the decision-making process may be flawed. I believe I am speaking for the whole commission when I say that it is flawed,” Rogers told them. “Clearly flawed.”
With their examination of the role of human error in the accident at an end, the members of the commission now turned to finding its immediate technical cause. They set out to investigate the exact mechanism by which the solid rocket boosters failed, and why it had come only after twenty-four apparently successful flights. They planned to explore how the seals were made, the way the rockets were assembled at the Cape, and whether the constant modifications made to the shuttle fleet since the first launch of Columbia in 1981 had placed additional strain on vital parts of the system. At the same time, a dedicated staff including serving astronauts, National Transportation Safety Board investigators, and FBI agents began interviewing those involved at every level of the Challenger launch process. Adopting the techniques of a criminal inquiry, the team gathered documents, took testimony, and collected signed affidavits from witnesses at NASA centers and contractors around the country; the work would continue for months.
As the tentacles of the investigation unwound into NASA’s vast bureaucracy, in Washington, DC, President Reagan’s staff began to wonder how badly damaged the space agency might eventually be by the commission’s findings. What had begun at least in part as a political exercise in transparency—to provide dignified supervision of NASA’s investigation into itself—had slipped from their control. Disquieting revelations were now spilling steadily into the media, with new and more pernicious details emerging all the time, just as it had during Watergate; there was no telling where it would end.
“It’s like an artichoke,” one White House official said. “Every day they peel something else.”