I have posted this story before.
I spent most of my aerospace career as a Shuttle engineer.
Like everyone else, I thought the official O-ring story made sense. There’s even a new book out by a Morton Thiokol guy on the O-ring disaster.
However, in 1999 I was talking to an old engineer who had worked for United Technologies at KSC. This is what he told me:
“Solid Rocket Boosters are made in segments. After the SRBs burn out, they land in the Atlantic with parachutes, are recovered, and refurbished at Morton Thiokol. Then, they are re-assembled at KSC for another launch.
However, on one landing, the SRB hit hard and was bent. No one realized this until they tried to assemble the section into an SRB at KSC.
The bolts are approx. 1” diameter on 4” centers at the joints. On this section, the SRB segment had been bent out of round and the bolt holes did not line up.
So, an engineer suggested plugging the problem holes and drilling NEW holes for the bolts between the old ones.
So, with their NASA Manager’s approval, they took out about 30% of the steel by drilling new holes. NO structural analysis was performed. The NASA guy got a bonus for “saving” the SRB segment.
Upon pressurization, the area with extra holes ripped open like a perforated sheet of paper. You can see the puff of smoke in the launch video. The flame hit attach point hardware weakening it. When they hit a wind shear at about 30,000 feet, the SRB broke off and hit the External Tank.”
This UT engineer assumed that the Accident Commission would find all this out. When they had a press conference, he was shocked they were blaming O-rings.
So, he went to the head of the Commission and told his story. The top guy responded, “We already had a press conference. If we change our findings now, NASA will lose credibility. All of these imminent scientists and engineers will be embarrassed. We will NOT change our findings.”
So, the innocent were punished. The guilty NASA Manager kept his bonus. Everybody kept their mouths shut.
They quietly put the word out to never drill extra holes in an SRB.
I doubt the Shuttle Program Manager, NASA Administrator, or almost anyone else in the world knows this.
I record this story in the hope that someday a historian or journalist will set the record straight.
Ad astra.
Were you yourself a Shuttle engineer, or are you quoting someone else? In any case, it's an incredible story which makes perfect sense, at least to me.
Thank you.
That was back in the day when the office secretary of our small environmental company would bring her TV in with the rabbit ears and we would gather around to watch every launch.
It was such a shock and so hard to believe. Around that same time was the truck bombing at the World Trade Center IIRC. Hmm - now that I think about it, she may have had that TV in her office all the time.
Not too long after the Challenger disaster I was doing some work at a haz waste site. Walking over hard black goo in spots that had oozed up through the sand. The site had been used by Morton Thiokol as a disposal site. I always wondered if this black crap was what they had made the gaskets out of?
IIRC there was some sort of environmental component to the failure? Like the original gaskets were made of something “bad” - so they switched to something more environmentally “safe”.
While being in the environmental business, the boss and I were (and still are) very conservative.
“So how the hell does the EPA tell us .001 ppm mercury is too much, but we can only measure to .01!!!???” Or something like that! (Back in the day that was the truth! I suppose nowadays they have better instruments.).
Thanks
Ah no. The initial smoke puff was carbon black indicating the o-ring failed. It is also very clear from flight videos recovered after the fact that there was no blow out of metal, but a hot jet at the point of failure of the o-ring along the joint itself. If there had been a metal failure, it would have been found in the investigation.