NOW that I’ve had more time to think about it, I still like Mr. Rogers, and I still feel that everything’s okay. It’s my judgment that he’s a fine man. Over the course of the commission I got to appreciate his talents and his abilities, and I have great respect for him. Mr. Rogers has a very good, smooth way about him, so I reserve in my head the possibility—not as a suspicion, but as an unknown—that I like him because he knew how to make me like him. I prefer to assume he’s a genuinely fine fellow, and that he is the way he appears. But I was in Washington long enough to know that I can’t tell.
I’m not exactly sure what Mr. Rogers thinks of me. He gives me the impression that, in spite of my being such a pain in the ass to him in the beginning, he likes me very much. I may be wrong, but if he feels the way I feel toward him, it’s good.
Mr. Rogers, being a lawyer, had a difficult job to run a commission investigating what was essentially a technical question. With Dr. Keel’s help, I think the technical part of it was handled well. But it struck me that there were several fishinesses associated with the big cheeses at NASA.
Every time we talked to higher level managers, they kept saying they didn’t know anything about the problems below them. We’re getting this kind of thing again in the Iran-Contra hearings, but at that time, this kind of situation was new to me: either the guys at the top didn’t know, in which case they should have known, or they did know, in which case they’re lying to us.
When we learned that Mr. Mulloy had put pressure on Thiokol to launch, we heard time after time that the next level up at NASA knew nothing about it. You’d think Mr. Mulloy would have notified a higher-up during this big discussion, saying something like, “There’s a question as to whether we should fly tomorrow morning, and there’s been some objection by the Thiokol engineers, but we’ve decided to fly anyway—what do you think?” But instead, Mulloy said something like, “All the questions have been resolved.” There seemed to be some reason why guys at the lower level didn’t bring problems up to the next level.
I invented a theory which I have discussed with a considerable number of people, and many people have explained to me why it’s wrong. But I don’t remember their explanations, so I cannot resist telling you what I think led to this lack of communication in NASA.
When NASA was trying to go to the moon, there was a great deal of enthusiasm: it was a goal everyone was anxious to achieve. They didn’t know if they could do it, but they were all working together.
I have this idea because I worked at Los Alamos, and I experienced the tension and the pressure of everybody working together to make the atomic bomb. When somebody’s having a problem—say, with the detonator—everybody knows that it’s a big problem, they’re thinking of ways to beat it, they’re making suggestions, and when they hear about the solution they’re excited, because that means their work is now useful: if the detonator didn’t work, the bomb wouldn’t work.
I figured the same thing had gone on at NASA in the early days: if the space suit didn’t work, they couldn’t go to the moon. So everybody’s interested in everybody else’s problems.
But then, when the moon project was over, NASA had all these people together: there’s a big organization in Houston and a big organization in Huntsville, not to mention at Kennedy, in Florida. You don’t want to fire people and send them out in the street when you’re done with a big project, so the problem is, what to do?
You have to convince Congress that there exists a project that only NASA can do. In order to do so, it is necessary—at least it was apparently necessary in this case—to exaggerate: to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it could fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered. “The shuttle can make so-and-so many flights and it’ll cost such-and-such; we went to the moon, so we can do it!”
Meanwhile, I would guess, the engineers at the bottom are saying, “No, no! We can’t make that many flights. If we had to make that many flights, it would mean such-and-such!” And, “No, we can’t do it for that amount of money, because that would mean we’d have to do thus-and-so!”
Well, the guys who are trying to get Congress to okay their projects don’t want to hear such talk. It’s better if they don’t hear, so they can be more “honest”—they don’t want to be in the position of lying to Congress! So pretty soon the attitudes begin to change: information from the bottom which is disagreeable—“We’re having a problem with the seals; we should fix it before we fly again”—is suppressed by big cheeses and middle managers who say, “If you tell me about the seals problems, we’ll have to ground the shuttle and fix it.” Or, “No, no, keep on flying, because otherwise, it’ll look bad,” or “Don’t tell me; I don’t want to hear about it.”
Maybe they don’t say explicitly “Don’t tell me,” but they discourage communication, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a question of what has been written down, or who should tell what to whom; it’s a question of whether, when you do tell somebody about some problem, they’re delighted to hear about it and they say “Tell me more” and “Have you tried such-and-such?” or they say “Well, see what you can do about it”—which is a completely different atmosphere. If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed back, pretty soon you decide, “To hell with it.”
So that’s my theory: because of the exaggeration at the top being inconsistent with the reality at the bottom, communication got slowed up and ultimately jammed. That’s how it’s possible that the higher-ups didn’t know.
The other possibility is that the higher-ups did know, and they just said they didn’t know.
I looked up a former director of NASA—I don’t remember his name now—who is the head of some company in California. I thought I’d go and talk to him when I was on one of my breaks at home, and say, “They all say they haven’t heard. Does that make any sense? How does someone go about investigating them?”
He never returned my calls. Perhaps he didn’t want to talk to the commissioner investigating higher-ups; maybe he had had enough of NASA, and didn’t want to get involved. And because I was busy with so many other things, I didn’t push it.
There were all kinds of questions we didn’t investigate. One was this mystery of Mr. Beggs, the former director of NASA who was removed from his job pending an investigation that had nothing to do with the shuttle; he was replaced by Graham shortly before the accident. Nevertheless, it turned out that, every day, Beggs came to his old office. People came in to see him, although he never talked to Graham. What was he doing? Was there some activity still being directed by Beggs?
From time to time I would try to get Mr. Rogers interested in investigating such fishinesses. I said, “We have lawyers on the commission, we have company managers, we have very fine people with a large range of experiences. We have people who know how to get an answer out of a guy when he doesn’t want to say something. I don’t know how to do that. If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 105, I know he’s full of crap—but I don’t know what’s natural in a bureaucratic system. We oughta get some of the big shots together and ask them questions: just like we asked the second-level managers like Mr. Mulloy, we should ask the first level.”
He would say, “Yes, well, I think so.”
Mr. Rogers told me later that he wrote a letter to each of the big shots, but they replied that they didn’t have anything they wanted to say to us.
There was also the question of pressure from the White House.
It was the President’s idea to put a teacher in space, as a symbol of the nation’s commitment to education. He had proposed the idea a year before, in his State of the Union address. Now, one year later, the State of the Union speech was coming up again. It would be perfect to have the teacher in space, talking to the President and the Congress. All the circumstantial evidence was very strong.
I talked to a number of people about it, and heard various opinions, but I finally concluded that there was no pressure from the White House.
First of all, the man who pressured Thiokol to change its position, Mr. Mulloy, was a second-level manager. Ahead of time, nobody could predict what might get in the way of a launch. If you imagine Mulloy was told “Make sure the shuttle flies tomorrow, because the President wants it,” you’d have to imagine that everybody else at his level had to be told—and there are a lot of people at his level. To tell that many people would make it sure to leak out. So that way of putting on pressure was very unlikely.
By the time the commission was over, I understood much better the character of operations in Washington and in NASA. I learned, by seeing how they worked, that the people in a big system like NASA know what has to be done—without being told.
There was already a big pressure to keep the shuttle flying. NASA had a flight schedule they were trying to meet, just to show the capabilities of NASA—never mind whether the president was going to give a speech that night or not. So I don’t believe there was any direct activity or any special effort from the White House. There was no need to do it, so I don’t believe it was done.
I could give you an analog of that. You know those signs that appear in the back windows of automobiles—those little yellow diamonds that say BABY ON BOARD, and things like that? You don’t have to tell me there’s a baby on board; I’m gonna drive carefully anyway! What am I supposed to do when I see there’s a baby on board: act differently? As if I’m suddenly gonna drive more carefully and not hit the car because there’s a baby on board, when all I’m trying to do is not hit it anyway!
So NASA was trying to get the shuttle up anyway: you don’t have to say there’s a baby on board, or there’s a teacher on board, or it’s important to get this one up for the President.
Now that I’ve talked to some people about my experiences on the commission, I think I understand a few things that I didn’t understand so well earlier. One of them has to do with what I said to Dr. Keel that upset him so much. Recently I was talking to a man who spent a lot of time in Washington, and I asked him a particular question which, if he didn’t take it right, could be considered a grave insult. I would like to explain the question, because it seems to me to be a real possibility of what I said to Dr. Keel.
The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.
In other fields, such as business, it’s different. For example, almost every advertisement you see is obviously designed, in some way or another, to fool the customer: the print that they don’t want you to read is small; the statements are written in an obscure way. It is obvious to anybody that the product is not being presented in a scientific and balanced way. Therefore, in the selling business, there’s a lack of integrity.
My father had the spirit and integrity of a scientist, but he was a salesman. I remember asking him the question “How can a man of integrity be a salesman?”
He said to me, “Frankly, many salesmen in the business are not straightforward—they think it’s a better way to sell. But I’ve tried being straightforward, and I find it has its advantages. In fact, I wouldn’t do it any other way. If the customer thinks at all, he’ll realize he has had some bad experience with another salesman, but hasn’t had that kind of experience with you. So in the end, several customers will stay with you for a long time and appreciate it.”
My father was not a big, successful, famous salesman; he was the sales manager for a medium-sized uniform company. He was successful, but not enormously so.
When I see a congressman giving his opinion on something, I always wonder if it represents his real opinion or if it represents an opinion that he’s designed in order to be elected. It seems to be a central problem for politicians. So I often wonder: what is the relation of integrity to working in the government?
Now, Dr. Keel started out by telling me that he had a degree in physics. I always assume that everybody in physics has integrity—perhaps I’m naive about that—so I must have asked him a question I often think about: “How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?”
It’s very easy to read that question another way: “Since you’re getting along in Washington, you can’t be a man of integrity!”
Another thing I understand better now has to do with where the idea came from that cold affects the O-rings. It was General Kutyna who called me up and said, “I was working on my carburetor, and I was thinking: what is the effect of cold on the O-rings?”
Well, it turns out that one of NASA’s own astronauts told him there was information, somewhere in the works of NASA, that the O-rings had no resilience whatever at low temperatures—and NASA wasn’t saying anything about it.
But General Kutyna had the career of that astronaut to worry about, so the real question the General was thinking about while he was working on his carburetor was, “How can I get this information out without jeopardizing my astronaut friend?” His solution was to get the professor excited about it, and his plan worked perfectly.