National newspapers remember the late rocket engineer Roger Boisjoly
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0201
Is it safe to assert that in federally funded Big Science and NASA, bureaucratic and political motivations often work perversely against common sense and science itself? Those who think so may want to join the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and others in marking the passing of rocket engineer Roger Boisjoly, who foresaw—and tried to stop—the 1986 loss of the shuttle Challenger with its crew of seven.
Like the physicist Richard Feynman, who served on a high-level investigating panel and helped Americans understand how and why Challenger had been lost, Boisjoly famously spurned political restraints when he forthrightly questioned the fatal launch decision. The difference is that Feynman could only instruct Americans after the fact about O-ring seals and a Florida morning that was too cold for safely igniting the shuttle’s engines. Boisjoly fought, but lost, the battle to stop the launch in the first place.
Boisjoly actually died in Utah a month ago, on 6 January. According to the New York Times ‘s 4 February obituary, the death was reported only locally at the time. But now at least some in the media are catching up.
Here are the Times‘s opening paragraphs:
Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail.
“The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” he wrote.
The memo was meant to jolt Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters and employed Mr. Boisjoly. In July 1985, a task force had been formed, partly on Mr. Boisjoly’s recommendation, to examine the effect of cold on the boosters. The effort, however, had become mired in paperwork, procurement delays and a rush to launch the shuttle, according to later investigations.
Meanwhile, his apprehensions only grew. The night before the Challenger’s liftoff, the temperature dipped below freezing. Unusual for Florida, the cold was unprecedented for a shuttle launching, and it prompted Mr. Boisjoly and other engineers to plead that the flight be postponed. Their bosses, under pressure from NASA, rejected the advice.
The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launching, killing its seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, N.H.
The Times reports that Boisjoly was eventually awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but that “before then he had paid the stiff price often exacted of whistle-blowers. Thiokol cut him off from space work, and he was shunned by colleagues and managers. . . . He had headaches, double-vision and depression, he said. He yelled at his dog and his daughters and skipped church to avoid people.”
The Washington Post ‘s 8 February obituary, originally from the 7 February Los Angeles Times , reported that Boisjoly “could not watch the launch, so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up.”
The piece adds that “the disaster changed his career and permanently poisoned his view that NASA could be trusted to make the right decisions when matters came to life and death.” It continues:
The Challenger disaster and the resulting investigation pulled back the curtain on NASA’s internal culture, revealing a bureaucracy that had made safety secondary to its launch objectives and to the political support it needed to continue the shuttle program.
“It was the end of the dream,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aerospace. “Before the Challenger, you could think about the idea of going boldly where no one had gone before. The accident ended it.”
The Post‘s obituary ends on a similar note:
When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger shuttle. By that time, Mr. Boisjoly said that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished.
NASA’s mismanagement “is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel,” Mr. Boisjoly said. “I don’t care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.”
A letter to the Los Angeles Times generally affirms the obituary, but criticizes its assertion that the Challenger explosion was “among the great engineering miscalculations in history.” No it wasn’t, the writer says. “It was management hubris and political irresponsibility on a tragic scale. The managers who created this tragedy have largely escaped responsibility. The politicos who applied the pressure to launch are revered by their acolytes. As always, engineers are left with the bitter ‘if only.’ ”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.