Challenger Revisted

I frequent a number of forums and blog about aircraft building, flying etc. I posted a couple fo questions to folks about where they were the day Challenge exploded and got a lot of really great responses. That's not what this post is about. This post is about my experiences with one of the only good things to come out of the disaster.

The investigation into the accident led to a number of findings. The fault was layed on Morton-Thiokol for a design flaw in the O-rings on the shuttle solid rocket boosters. They failed due to the unusually low tempuratures that Winter in Florida.

What else was discovered was that Morton-Thiokol engineers warned management about the potnetial failure but were they shut-down.

This led to a HUGE surge in engineering ethics education. I don't remember the exact class. It might have been part of my senior design or somethign else. Doesn't matter. What matters is that the shuttle fiasco was used to teach us about our ethical responsibilites as engineers. We were taken through the entire process that led to the failure from start to finish and show a real-world consequence of failing to live up to your responsibilities.

This part of the class was not a simple, 'this is what you do'. It was entirely discussion based. We were asked questions like 'In this situation, what would YOU do?'. 'Were the Thiolkol engineers negligent in their responsibilities?, Was Thiokol management negligent?

We discussed this issues for several days. The final conclusion was that there really wasn't a right answer. The #1 thing to get from the discussions was to THINK about your actions and their potential consequences.

Challenger

25 years ago I was a senior at Florida Air Academy in Melbourne, Florida. It was about 11:30am and I was in the school parking lot; on my way to study hall. I had my calculus and government studies textbook with me.

I vividly remember that day even now. I can picture myself walking away from admin offices and towards the school main front porch. I stopped briefly because someone yelled 'there goes the shuttle!'. I stopped and turned to look north and saw the Challenger rising up into the sky...just in time to watch it explode. I couldn't tell you anything about that rest of that day, week or month.

Time has fuzzied up the bits and pieces surrounding that day but the singular event will probably never fade.