Sarah: And why is it that we're sending people into space like gangbusters during this period, anyway? What's the justification for that? I realize I sound like I’m 80.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About the show where the villain is always capitalism. I saw the Fugitive since we last recorded, and all I want to do is chase capitalism down to some sort of irrigation thing outside Chicago and capitalism will say, “But wait, I can still be a viable system for organizing society.” And I'll say, “I don't care.” And then capitalism will be exempt.
Mike: Is that our longest tagline ever?
Sarah: Oh, that has to be by a factor of a million.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I’m Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer in residence at the Black Mountain Institute. Though right now I'm in my childhood bedroom closet, because I am home for the holidays.
Mike: And today we are talking about the Challenger explosion.
Sarah: Which I am very excited to learn about.
Mike: Well, I feel weird about it. Because everyone else, it seems, has these memories as a kid of watching the Challenger explosion. But I was born in 1982, so I was only four when it happened. So it has no big meaning for me, it's not something that I watched happen or was really aware of. But anyone who is just a couple of years older than me, it's this huge touchstone moment.
Sarah: And I wasn't born, because I was born in 1988. And so it's something that a whole generation of people experienced, but that had no permanence in American memory. Because after that, it's not as if it became this part of our curriculum where we were like, and now the Challenger disaster. I chose it as something to study in a ‘choose your favorite NASA mission’ in science class thing. And I chose Challenger, and characteristically found a way to only read a very small portion of the book that I was supposed to read to learn about it. So Christa McAuliffe was the only thing I learned about. But even based on that approach, I remember finding it very surreal and sad.
Mike: What do you remember about the actual Challenger explosion? Do you want to walk me through the actual events?
Sarah: So they were like, let's have a non-astronaut come into space because. I don’t know in the same way that the Donner party actually attempted to cross the Sierra as after pioneers have been doing that for quite some time without any incident and had just gotten real brazen about it, they were like, “Hey, we've inexplicably gone a few years without some sort of terrible disaster. I think we can just be totally calm about this forever”.
And so they chose her as a teacher to go into space. And then there was a little rubber O-ring somewhere, somewhere on the spaceship, some tiny little component that because it was really cold that morning, cracked. And then there was a whole systems failure. I mean, I've seen the footage. It's hard to tell exactly what happens.
Mike: Yeah. It's awful.
Sarah: Because it just disintegrated. It just seems like something that if I had been shown that as a child and in the context that children were shown it, they would just be like, oh fuck. Maybe that's what caused millennials, actually, just being like, “Wow, so we really got overconfident, didn’t we?”
Mike: I mean, one of the reasons why it has this oversized place in people's imagination at the time, and then kind of disappears, is mostly because as usual we learned the wrong lessons from it. It was seen at the time as like an accident or something that's caused by evil middle managers. But actually the way that I found this and the way that I realized how wrong I was about the Challenger explosion, is I'm working on a top secret article that is putting me in proximity to the issue of state corporate crimes. Things where the government is essentially complicit in white collar crimes. And it comes up a lot in this literature that academics are like, well, as everyone knows, the Challenger explosion is the perfect example of white collar crime. And I was like, hang on a second.
Sarah: Rosebud is who, exactly?
Mike: But that's actually true. And we will get into why that is the case, and you know how this got reinterpreted through time. But first of all, that was actually a very lucid recollection, Sarah, and your memory of this is way better than mine was two weeks ago.
Sarah: Well it’s my memory of my research paper in seventh grade. And I think because I troubled myself with so little actual research material, I tended to really retain it.
Mike: What you're getting at is one of the first major myths of this, which is that everybody watched it live on TV.
Sarah: Oh, they didn't?
Mike: Very few people actually did. None of the networks actually carried it. I mean, first of all, this is at 11:30 in the morning on a weekday, so very few people are in a position to be watching TV at that hour. Another thing is, and we've completely forgotten this now, this was the 10th shuttle launch in a year. There's like one shuttle launch a month at this point. Before the explosion, no one was seeing this as particularly noteworthy. The only noteworthy thing about it actually is the fact that it's the first time a space shuttle mission has ever had a civilian on it. And so the kids that are watching it in school are sort of the only people that are watching it.
Sarah: So it was like very important news to kids the whole time, but adults were never paying attention.
Mike: Yeah. And it's one of the reasons why it is this indelible moment because lots of schools got this feed. Lots of schools took a break to watch this because Christa McAuliffe.
Sarah: Can we say from the beginning too, don't you think she has the face of a nice lady.
Mike: Oh my God. I mean.
Sarah: She's 40. And so by the time you're 40, you've developed a face that shows the expressions you've been making that whole time. And she has a nice lady face.
Mike: I know. I put off all of the research about Christa McAuliffe for basically the whole two weeks that I was researching this because I knew that it was going to make me fucking cry. And I knew that talking about her at all in any length of time is going to make me cry, and I'm going to completely break down.
So last week I was at the gym and I was waiting for my boyfriend to come meet me there, and I had like an hour to kill and I was like, finally, fuck it. I'm just going to read up about Christa McAuliffe. By the time my boyfriend arrived, I was just like this wet mess. Just looking at my laptop reading about it. And it's true, they announced this thing called ‘the teacher in space program’ in 1984. They got 11,000 applications, one of which of course was Christa McAuliffe. They brought in all the shortlists of various teachers around the country. And basically everybody says that the main reason why Christa McAuliffe was chosen was because she's just a really nice lady. She just had this personality that just made you like her instantly. And she also did a bunch of lessons around the way that ordinary people have changed history. So her whole thing was she was going to keep a journal the whole time she was up in space, kind of like the pioneer women. She wanted to come back with this day-to-day log.
Sarah: Oh, that's so cool.
Mike: She was going to do two lessons from space. This is the one where I'm going to try to say this without crying. She had two kids, she had a nine-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter, and she brought a stuffed frog named Flegel with her, and she was going to wave it in front of the camera to show it to her son, Scott.
Sarah: Oh, boy.
Mike: I mean, she really does sound like a genuinely special person.
Sarah: I feel like I get way more sad about NASA accidentally killing someone then, I don't know, a deranged pit bull. Just this thing where, we're NASA. We will take you into space and we will help you teach the world. And I hope that in this story there was some way that they could have done better than that.
Mike: Well, this episode might cure you of your idealism about NASA. That might be your main takeaway from this.
Sarah: Is NASA the one federal agency that I still want to believe in, and then I'm going to have to give up today? All right.
Mike: It's really hard to decide how to structure this, because there's essentially three narratives that form about the reason for the explosion. But the technical details of why the challenger broke apart are really important. So I'm going to go through what actually happened that morning. So it's January 28th, 1986,
Sarah: By the way, I'm so excited right now. I feel like I'm Laura Dern and you're one of the Attenborough's, I forget which. It's very exciting. Continue.
Mike: This is slightly the blind leading the blind, because I am the least technically proficient person. I need a three man team to hang a photo in my apartment. I'm terrible. And so I've been trying to figure out all of the technical details of why this actually broke. And what's really interesting is, you know how with every plane crash it's this chain of events, right? The landing gear won't go down. And then the computer that was supposed to fix it was down, and the pilot was asleep, and the light that was supposed to come on, didn't come on.
Sarah: I do not actually have general knowledge of how plane crashes can really work
Mike: In general it's a chain of very rare events, and they all have to happen at once. What's really interesting about this is that's not how this is. This is one thing that goes wrong. There was a .04 inch mistake, and that was enough to destroy the entire mission.
So when you think of a space shuttle, there's four components. There's the actual space shuttle, right? The actual airplane. Then there's the big rocket tank that’s attached to the space shuttle, right? The big thing in the middle. And then there's on the side there's the two little Roman candles attached to the side. Are you with me so far?
Sarah: Yes. Thank you for checking though. I appreciate that.
Mike: So the way that it works is, or the way that it's supposed to work, the giant thing, the giant column in the middle is the main fuel tank that gets you out of Earth's atmosphere. And the rocket boosters on the side, the little Roman candles on the side, those only burn for two minutes, because that's the hardest, there's the most air pressure.
Sarah: Because you're escaping gravity's surly embrace or whatever.
Mike: Yeah. That's the hardest two minutes. So you need these two extra rocket boosters to get you up to the place where the giant middle booster can take you from there.
Sarah: So it’s all very strategic. You're using every ounce of power you can possibly get. It's still like you're tricking gravity into letting you go.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting is of course, you know, these little rocket boosters on the side of the rocket look like little bottle rockets that are duct-taped to the entire apparatus, but they're actually 150 feet tall. The way that they work is they are made out of four different segments, because they are built in Utah and then they're trucked to Florida for the launch. So you have to break them into four different segments to get them on trucks. And then once they're in Florida, they are shoved together and then they're ready for the launch.
And so this metaphor is wrong in a million ways, but it's the closest thing that I can come to understanding how this O-ring stuff works. Basically you've got these four segments of the rocket booster, and it's a little bit like if you cut the bottom and the top off of a bunch of water bottles, and then you sort of shoved them together so they're kind of overlapping, that's essentially how the rocket booster is put together. It's these overlapping tubes that go kind of around each other with this area of overlap. As you can imagine, if you just tried to do this with a bunch of water bottles and then you tried to fill it with water, the water would leak out all of those joints. So what the rocket scientists come up with is, what if we put a rubber band around the inside water bottle, and that way when we push the outside water bottle over it, it's going to create this little rubber seal that's going to keep water from pouring out.
Sarah: So it's just an airtight seal. It’s something that has to create a complete seal.
Mike: Yes. And this sounds like I'm exaggerating this, but this is actually true. So the way that they have these overlapping segments over each other is they put an O ring, which is the rubber band. They put that around the inside seal and then essentially, they put silly putty around it. So the way that these segments are put together and there's clamps and there's nails and there's other things. But the most important thing for creating an airtight seal is this rubber band, and they put a bunch of very advanced, silly putty around it. And so when you think of an O-ring, you think of something that's small, it's a couple inches in diameter. The actual rings are 38 feet around, so it's 38 feet circumference, but they're only a quarter of an inch thick. So that is what is holding together these four segments.
Sarah: Okay. So, that's what it is. It's a 38 foot rubber band. Wow.
Mike: I'm wildly oversimplifying things. But as far as the seal between the two segments, that's the most important thing, the silly putty and the rubber band. What happens is it's January, and Florida has a once in a lifetime cold snap.
Sarah: Classic Florida.
Mike: Classic Florida. The night before the launch, the temperature gets to eight degrees Fahrenheit, which I didn't even know could happen in Florida. What we know now is that these O-rings, these rubber bands, when they get cold, they lose structural integrity, they don’t work as well.
Sarah: And if they just never tested them for that, because they're like, well, we're in Florida, this will never happen. What are the odds?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, the big thing is when you're talking about going to space, the thing you think you need to deal with is heat, right? You're burning all this fuel. And so what you think you need to be able to withstand is like 10,000 degrees temperature. That’s what everybody is working toward. We need to make sure that it withstands heat. But what nobody considers is that when something gets cold, it's not as good at withstanding heat. So that's a little bit confusing, but once something gets cold, it then breaks up when it's exposed to heat, as opposed to flexing.
Sarah: Because it gets brittle, and it loses elasticity, and it loses its structural integrity.
Mike: Yeah. The other thing that's really important about this is that this whole thing with the overlapping water bottles and the rubber band and the silly putty, is actually a standard thing. They use it in missiles. They use it in cars. If you break open a car, you'll find a million O-rings, this is a known solution to these types of problems. But what's important about the other O-rings that you find in cars and all these other things is that they don't flex. They're usually solid objects, whereas in a solid rocket booster, because the pressures inside the rocket are so insane, the joints between these segments are actually flexing. Kind of like if you squeezed one of the water bottles, the other ones would flex a little bit. That's happening and O-rings are not designed for that. There's no other application of O-rings that deals with flexing and it's rotating a little bit. So the O-ring has to kind of deal with this vibration.
So what happens is it's eight degrees overnight in Florida. These O-rings get a little bit stiffer overnight. It's kind of crazy. There are icicles on the launch pad the morning of the launch. They've never dealt with conditions this cold before. So there's all these inspection teams that go out to the launch pad. There are photos, actually, of the gauges that they're using, all the instrument displays that have this beard of icicles. It looks very abandoned, North Pole radio tower type of thing, but it's actually the middle of this launch, but nobody really knows the effect of the cold on the O-rings at the time. So like, well, that's weird, but then it starts getting warmer as it's daytime. So by the time they launch it's 36 degrees, which is the coldest launch ever, but at the time, nobody really thinks about it. Whatever cold is not a big deal, because we're supposed to be dealing with heat.
So the shuttle lifts off at 11:38 AM. I mean, one of the sad and scary things about this is that there is no problem for the first 72 seconds of the flight. Nothing looks amiss. There's no problem with the pressure and then nobody's expecting it. And then the whole thing just breaks apart in the air. So at 73 seconds after launch, the entire thing breaks up. And there's this really heartbreaking sort of play-by-play that is in one of the commissions reports later that says, “There were no alarms sounded in the cockpit. The crew apparently had no indication of a problem before the rapid breakup of the space shuttle. The first evidence of an accident came from live video coverage, radar then began to track multiple objects.”
So, what happens is what we know now, is that the space shuttle launches this rocket booster when the cold O-ring springs a leak at 73 seconds. Like I said, it's only a .04 of an inch gap between the two segments, but that's enough for this jet of rocket fuel to blast out of the booster rocket. And then, because there's this jet of fuel blasting out of it, the pressure drops and the rest of the rocket loses all of its thrust. And then basically the entire thing breaks apart. So one of the things about solid booster rockets is you can't turn them off. They are like a Roman candle where you light them, and they just go off for two minutes. There's no way to control them. So, because pressure drops in one of the solid booster rockets, the right hand booster rocket, it actually falls off the main rocket, it twists around. And then because of that, the other one falls off too.
Sarah: Yeah. So it's essentially like an imbalance, initially. It gets pulled out of balance and starts wobbling around.
Mike: Yeah. And then both rockets essentially get twisted off of this main middle rocket. The forces are so great to get this giant million pound object into space, the forces are so great that the minute anything goes a little wrong, the minute the angle changes a little bit, everything just starts spinning around. So a really fucked up thing about the footage if you watch the footage, is the two booster rockets keep going. They both just kind of twist off of the main rocket and they do actually fly around like bottle rockets, these giant hundred and 50 foot tall things are just spinning around for another 45 seconds. And another one of the weird myths of this is that there's no explosion. So it looks like an explosion because basically all of the jet fuel ends up blasting out of one booster rocket. So there's this giant cloud of jet fuel and smoke, but there's no actual boom, there's no explosion. What happens is later on a lot of the TV stations that are showing this footage, 10 million times, they add the sound of an explosion in post.
Sarah: What?
Mike: Yes. Because kind of like the movie Gravity, there's no sound and people couldn't deal with that. So in the trailers for that movie, they add explosion sounds. It looks like there should be sound. And so TV producers are like, uhhh.
Sarah: I mean it does, but that doesn't mean that there is any.
Mike: That's the thing, we remember this big *boom*.
Sarah: Yes, because we were told there was one! Jesus.
Mike: I mean the super tragic thing about this is because there's no explosion, the astronauts are alive for another minute.
Sarah: Oh my god. I never knew that.
Mike: They’re on this upward trajectory. They're going about 20,000 miles an hour upwards. The entire craft breaks apart and ends up spinning around because of these insane forces. The space shuttle is also twisted off of the main engine and just ends up going on its trajectory like a bullet. It just goes upward for a little bit and then it arcs and then it comes down and it eventually just hits the Atlantic ocean going 200 miles an hour. The closest thing to good news from all of this that you can get is that it's pretty likely, because of the forces involved, that the crew is unconscious, but it went down for as long as it went up and they were technically alive for all of that time. And they actually recover their bodies about six months later.
Sarah: I didn't know that they ever recovered bodies from it.
Mike: Yeah, it's awful. And we totally forget this now at the time, no one had any idea what went wrong. All this O-ring stuff we don't know for at least another couple of weeks. So there's concerns about terrorism. There are concerns about sabotage
Sarah: And this has never happened before, right? Wasn't it that the only NASA deaths had been the three men who died who were part of project Gemini?
Mike: Exactly. And this continues to this day to some extent, but NASA had this invincible reputation that everybody loves NASA, right? We're putting men on the moon and it's these nerds doing math.
Sarah: Yes. I like NASA.
Mike: Yes, me too. I mean, who can be against NASA? And so in the immediate aftermath of this, there's a huge rescue effort, of course. So they have to scan something like 300 square miles of ocean to recover all of the pieces. It's like a nine month effort. There are divers, it's this huge thing. They do all of this burn analysis of the parts that they pull out of the water. They figured out where it's burned.
Sarah: Imagine being one of the divers or one of the people working on that project and for maybe months and months, that's your job every day is to go and recover little pieces of debris from the ocean.
Mike: And for the people putting it together, it's essentially the world's biggest episode of CSI. You're putting together puzzle pieces of rockets and only, I think 20% or 30% of the rockets, are ever recovered because the rest of it is just essentially vaporized or thrown too far away or too small. And so you have these fragments and based on these fragments, you have to figure out what actually happened. And a huge part of this is actually looking at the footage.
So one of the things they find out relatively soon, because there's something like a hundred cameras looking at the space shuttle when it launches in these high def, high frame rate cameras for the engineer so in case anything does go wrong, they can look at it afterwards. They figure out that right at launch, you can see a little puff of gray smoke from the back of one of the rocket boosters. And that is the first clue of the O-ring failure, there should not be a puff of gray smoke that comes out of the rocket. That is actually the O-ring failing, but the temperatures are so high that the silly putty, the putty that they're putting on it, actually melts and closes the hole. What happens is the failure is at launch, but it manages to go 73 seconds before it burns through the silly putty. And the jet of fuel comes out.
Sarah: If that hadn't happened and if the silly putty hadn't filled in the hole at launch time, what would have happened if that whole just appeared during launch?
Mike: I mean, this is something that comes up actually.
Sarah: Speculate on this, NASA engineer friend.
Mike: If they had known something was wrong that quickly, they theoretically could have aborted, but this puff of gray smoke, nobody, I mean, if you look at the footage it's tiny and it only shows up for a couple of frames. And it's sort of in between the booster rocket and the main rocket too, so it's sort of hidden. So it's only when you look at footage from a hundred different cameras frame by frame that you like, oh that's weird.
Sarah: And when you know what you're looking for.
Mike: Yes. So the immediate aftermath is NASA is in complete disarray because it's never had anything like this before. It has no protocols in place in case something goes wrong. It has no idea what it's doing.
Sarah: This is a real theme we've uncovered.
Mike: Yes. President Reagan was actually scheduled to give the State of the Union the next day and so they postponed that. Reagan gave a televised address with this very famous statement where he said, ‘We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God’. Reagan is trash and we will get into the trashness of Reagan in this whole thing, but you have to give some credit for being the mourner in chief.
Sarah: Oh yeah. He was good at that. He had human feelings.
Mike: The lowest bar.
Sarah: But it is a nice poem. He looked sincere reading it. You can see why he got elected.
Mike: Yes. And the second thing he does, and this is really important, is immediately he appoints a commission to look into the crash.
Sarah: Still, no word on AIDS.
Mike: Priorities. But it's actually interesting. So there's a presidential commission called The Rogers Commission because it's headed by this guy named William Rogers, who was the former Secretary of State. And it's a little bit weird in that they pack this commission with a bunch of famous astronauts and scientists. So Neil Armstrong is on it. Chuck Yeager is on it. It's sort of a who's who of the greatest scientific minds. Importantly, there's also a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Richard Feynman who's on it.
Sarah: Oh yeah. I love Richard Feynman, he makes physics fun.
Mike: He’s awesome. He's 68 at the time, but just sharp as a tack, a wonderful guy.
Sarah: I feel like if you pack a special committee with a bunch of astronauts and physicists, they're going to go do a cross Washington pub crawl too, at some point.
Mike: Yeah. I read an oral history of the commission and there's these stories of Neil Armstrong basically just getting wasted all the time and telling stories of the moon landing.
Sarah: I would certainly hope so. If I were Neil Armstrong, I would just be making lunar landers out of my pretzels at the bar.
Mike: So the first thing the Rogers Commission does, and sort of the most important thing, is they figured out the cause of the crash. This is huge. They have tons of people come and testify. They look at a million documents, they figure out this O-ring thing.
Sarah: And then they achieved their declared end, which is truly astounding.
Mike: And there's this amazing TV moment where Richard Feynman, this physicist guy, gets an O-ring from his friend's car. Every commission panelist has a glass of ice water in front of them. So he actually takes the O-ring, puts it in a figure eight and then puts it in a clamp to hold it in the figure eight. And he dunks it in the water. This is while one of the scientists is testifying. He's like, oh, do you mind if I grab that? Okay, I'm just going to put this in my water. Don't mind me. When the guy is done testifying, he pulls the O-ring out of the water and undoes the clamp. And you can actually see that the O-ring doesn't snap back into a circle, that it snaps back into a Pringles shape.
Sarah: He does a Mr. Wizard.
Mike: Yeah. And there's so few good TV moments in these things because they're so boring.
Sarah: And because Richard Feynman is so rarely invited to be a part of it.
Mike: Yeah. And then he says, ‘I think this may have some relevance to the problem before us’, in great scientific understatement.
Sarah: That's beautiful.
Mike: So that's the first thing they do. They figure out what actually happened. They figured out that it was just this O-ring and nothing else went wrong, which is completely wild, on a ship that has 20 million moving parts. The second thing they do, and this becomes really important for the myth that forms about the Challenger explosion, is the night before the launch, there was a teleconference between the managers and the engineers in which the engineers said it's too cold, we should delay the launch.
Sarah: What?
Mike: So it turns out that NASA, of course, had outsourced the construction of the solid booster rockets to a military company, right? The same way we outsource everything to Lockheed Martin or whatever. They outsourced the construction of the booster rockets to this company called Morton Thiokol, which I'm going to struggle to pronounce for this entire episode.
Sarah: This is going to be yet another sorted tale of government contracts gone wrong, isn't it?
Mike: I mean not to preview the ending, but extremely yes. What happens is, because these temperatures are forecast to be so cold overnight, NASA and the contractors decide to have a telecon. So they have a telecon with 34 people across five cities. They've got Utah, they've got Houston, they've got Florida.
Sarah: So they're having a massive miserable conference call eighties style.
Mike: Yeah, even just doing this on Skype with 34 people sounds like a nosebleed. I have no idea what the technology was for conference calls then, but I'm sure it was abysmal.
Sarah: I’m sure it was just men shouting.
Mike: And they're faxing each other slides and graphics and stuff. So in this telecon, the engineers say, “We are concerned. We've never had a launch this cold before.” There's this sort of retconning of this that happens in the late 1990s where a data visualization guru named Edward Tufte. He goes through actually the slides that the engineers showed the managers at NASA, and he shows that their data, the way that they presented it was awful.
So there’s these missile diagrams with some squares blacked in and some aren't and they're drawing it. And so what Edward Tufte does is he organizes all the data according to the temperature and how many problems with the O-rings they had previously. And if you look at that graph, it's just starkly obvious that the colder it is, the more problems there are with the O-rings. Boom. Obvious.
And then a little bit after that, there's an article in a peer review journal called like Science and Technology, or one of these kinds of main engineering journals. It's by these two engineers and they're basically like, “Hello, we are two of the engineers that were on the phone call and that explanation is totally wrong. Here is why.”
So this entire narrative of, if only they had the better data visualization, it's designed to be a New Yorker article or a podcast episode.
Sarah: It so is.
Mike: It’s like, if this one thing was different, everything would have changed.
Sarah: And that's what we call the thing that the book is called, the missing quibble.
Mike: Totally. And of course the more complicated and more true explanation is that after these rocket boosters go for two minutes, they fall off of the side of the rocket and they land in the ocean and then NASA goes and gets them. That's how it's supposed to work. They're recyclable. And so NASA goes and gets them and finds there's damage to the O-ring. So they knew that sometimes there was damage to the O-rings and sometimes there wasn't, but they didn't really understand why.
Sarah: Oh, interesting.
Mike: When you look at the data, it looks obvious that, oh wow. The coldest launch had the most damage to the O-ring. So obviously the cold is causing it. Well, what that explanation doesn't take into account is that the launch with the second most damage was the warmest launch ever. So they launched when it was 75 degrees and there was also damage to the O-rings. And what these two scientists say is that it really doesn't matter what the outside temperature is, what matters is the temperature of the O-rings. So they say in the same way that if you get a Bloody Mary and put a bunch of ice cubes in it, and you walk outside on a 75 degree day, it's a long time before your Bloody Mary is 75.
And so one of the things that they didn't take into account was that the ambient temperature doesn't actually matter, what matters is essentially how cold was it overnight and how low did the temperature of the O-rings get, but they didn't know any of that then.
Sarah: These are the things you learn by having a terrible disaster.
Mike: Yeah. Another big thing was that the way the telecon went wasn't actually the engineers versus NASA. What actually happened was that Morton Thiokol guys say, “It's too cold. We don't think you should leave.” NASA says, “What is your data? What evidence are you using to present this idea that it's too cold to launch?” And Morton Thiokol says, “Well, we don't have any data because we've never launched when it's that cold before.” And NASA is like, “Oh, so you're saying you have no idea evidence?”
Sarah: Oh come on. NASA, that's not good empirical reasoning.
Mike: Looking back on it, it's so obvious. But at the time it's basically just a feeling in the pit of their stomach among the engineers of, I don't feel great about this. It just feels off. But the NASA is like, well, how do we know that it's the temperature, this whole thing with temperature hasn't come up before
Sarah: In a massive twist, the independent contractors are the girlfriend with the feeling in the perfect storm.
Mike: And so they're presenting the data. People are shouting at each other. It gets really heated. NASA says, “Guys, this is getting too intense. Let's all take a 15 minute break. We'll all talk amongst our own teams, and we'll come back.” In this break from the call, the Morton Thiokol managers are like, “Sorry guys, you don't have evidence to make this call. You don't have evidence to delay the launch. And without evidence, we can't do anything. This is an evidence-based organization we're supposed to be science-based. We're supposed to have the data in front of us on which to make the call. And you guys don't have the data.” So essentially the engineers at Morton Thiokol were overruled by their own managers.
Sarah: It’s weird how the default is doing the more dangerous thing though. That's an interesting thing to default to, for lack of evidence.
Mike: Also this idea that you need to have evidence for an unprecedented thing. It's, oh, I shouldn't eat that hot dog off the ground. It's like, well, have you eaten a hot dog off the ground before? How do you know you shouldn't eat the hot dog off the ground?
Sarah: Well, it's the same thing we saw with the ‘Dingo’s got my baby’ where they're like, we know dingoes don’t eat babies, but if they did, here's exactly what it would and would not look like.
Mike: I mean, what's kind of amazing is Morton Thiokol then gives this sort of determination to launch and then NASA faxes them, you know, you have to sign off on it that the O-rings are sound and the engineers at Morton Thiokol refuse to sign it, so the manager is just sign in their place.
Sarah: Is that legal?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, according to the procedures at the time. I's organizational structure, my boss can overrule me. And so they got overruled by their bosses, which again, looks like one of those things now it's like, uhhh, but at the time it was relatively normal. It was just like, we can't make a delay launch decision on the pit of your stomach. This is really the main myth about the Challenger explosion that starts to get planted in the American consciousness, this idea that there was a telecon and the engineers made these objections. And then the information that the engineers objected to didn't make it to the higher levels of management.
So on one of the first pages over the Rogers Commission report is actually an org chart of NASA where it's like, level one is the CEO, Level two is the vice CEO, Level three… and it goes down all these levels. The engineers are sort of at level five in the organization, and it talks about how the information that people were nervous about the O-rings never made it past level four. So it was like the middle managers found out about it and just didn't pass the information upward. It becomes this thing of it's a problem of middle managers. It's a problem of information being blocked and that the CEO and the vice presidents and all the really important people didn't have the information. Nobody knew when the launch decision was made, that there had been this teleconference. Nobody knew that the engineers didn't sign the launch form. It was all at the working level, right? So the explanation is that NASA is going in blind, NASA doesn't even know that there had been these safety concerns and it just plows ahead.
Sarah: Nice.
Mike: So that's the main report. That's the conclusion of the main report. Another thing that I love is Richard Feynman, this physicist who did the O-ring demonstration, he puts out a dissenting report. He writes his own chapter. He's writing this on his own. Nobody knows that he's going to do this. And the main guy of the commission, Rogers, is super annoyed. So one of the things that Feynman does that is kind of a dick move is Rogers holds a press conference to announce all of the findings of the Rogers commission. The report is coming out tomorrow. Here's what we found. It's at 2:00 PM or whatever. Feynman is like, my press conference is at 3:00 PM. Thank you. So he has his own press conference to announce his own findings. And so Rogers is like, fuck you. We're not putting this into the report. We're not doing your chapter. Feynman is like, I'm not changing it. So it ends up being an appendix.
And what he says is basically, the Rogers commission is thinking too small. It's not necessarily just that a couple middle managers got it wrong, it's that the entire management structure of the organization is not set up for danger. So first of all, he notes that there's four other technical problems that were just not solved. He notes that in the main external fuel tank, there's some turbine engine, something that I don't understand, but it's showing cracks. And he's like, guys, it's not great to have cracks in your turbine engine and just keep going. He says the biggest thing is that no one knew why there was damage to the O-rings. So they were doing all these launches. They'd get the booster rockets back and they'd be like, that's weird. The O-rings are eroded. Huh. Then they just launch again.
Sarah: So they're noticing the damaged O-rings on previous launches a lot. And they're like, oh, well, anyway, none of our business.
Mike: Exactly. And what's amazing is a lot of the managers are saying things like, well, it only eroded by 30%. So that means we have a 70% safety factor. It has 70 more percent to go.
Sarah: 30 is a lot of percents.
Mike: Feynman is like, that is not what safety factor means. Sorry guys. The metaphor that he uses is if you're in a truck and you drive across a bridge and a pylon of the bridge gets a huge crack in it. You're not going to say, oh, well it only cracked 30% into the pylon. This is you using the bridge as it's designed, this is not an earthquake. This is not dropping a herd of elephants on the bridge. This is normal use of the bridge and you've got 30% crack in it. Nobody would consider that okay.
Sarah: It's like Richard Feynman is coming to check on, you know, a 7/11 franchise and Tampa. And he's like, why are you guys putting out hot dogs for three or four days in a row? And they're like, well, you know, no one really seems to complain. It seems fine. Firs,t we left them out for two days and then for three. And it's like, how things just kind of like slide a little bit at a time. And then people just keep doing things that seem like pretty unsafe practices, but until they get some kind of result, proving that it's a dangerous thing to do, they're going to kind of keep doing it because they just have to, what are they going to do? Make new hot dogs every time? Who has that kind of energy?
Mike: Feynman says it's like sending your kids out to play. And you're like, don't run in the street. It's dangerous. And then the kids come back and say, well, we ran in the street, and we didn't die. So it must not be dangerous. And then they'd run in the street again. He also mentioned that in the commission hearings, when they ask engineers, what was the risk? What was the chance of the rocket exploding? They'll say one in a thousand. But then when you ask managers, what are the risks of the rocket exploding? They'll say, oh one in a hundred thousand.
So you've got two orders of magnitude difference. The managers have no sense of the actual risks that this is all going to explode. Whereas the engineers, a one in a thousand chance is actually pretty high. I mean, if airplanes had that chance of crashing, we'd have hundreds of plane crashes every day. So a one in a thousand risk is a huge red flag.
Sarah: And the farther you get away from it, the safer it becomes, interestingly enough.
Mike: Exactly. And so the big thing is this report and his descent create this idea of a middle management problem. That there's information that is not flowing from the engineers to the top of the organization in the way that it should. So this really is the main explanation that most of the American public takes away from the Challenger explosion.
Sarah: Challenger non explosion.
Mike: So NASA has a 32 month hiatus from any space shuttle launches. I found a, where are they now, about all the middle managers in NASA and what happened to them.
Sarah: That sounds like a good Taboola clickbait listicle, where are they now NASA, middle managers of the mid-eighties.
Mike: I mean, as you'd expect, they all ended up transferred or demoted or whatever, but then weirdly, all the middle managers that actually objected also got demoted and transferred. So the people that ignored the warnings ended up working on NASA public relations or, you know, in different departments. But then also the people that were sort of the good guys that were like, I'm not comfortable with this mission. Those people were also demoted and transferred and worked for other companies. It just seems like everybody ended up working in other companies. So it's not clear there was any real accountability within the organization and also Morton Thiokol, this contractor was still the contractor. Nobody cut their contract. It was just whoopsie. And then they just kept going as usual. So that's explanation number one, evil middle managers.
Sarah: The classic.
Mike: Yes. So there's going to be to your wrongs about, that come out after this.
Sarah: This one is reaching baklava levels of twists and folds, I feel like.
Mike: The Rogers commission report came out in June of 1986. The House of Representatives does its own investigation that comes out in October. The first thing the House committee realizes is that this idea that the Morton Thiokol engineers are the good guys in all of this, isn't really true. So the idea of evil NASA and the heroic contractor, that does not fit with the evidence at all.
Sarah: Boy my emotions have really been taken on a coaster ride already.
Mike: I’m trying to do as many twists as possible. So I'm just throwing you around, emotionally.
Sarah: All right, David Fincher, lay it on me.
Mike: So one of the things that I cannot get over is, you know how when they do government projects, they don't really do them themselves, they put out a request for proposals. So they're like, we need someone to build us a rocket booster, right?
Sarah: I really have no idea how the government functions. That sounds like something they would do.
Mike: You'll have to trust me. This is how it works. So they want a company to build these rocket boosters. So they put out publicly, they say, we are looking for a company to build rocket boosters. You should be big, and you should have this many employees and you should have this much expertise. And this is how much it should cost and dah, dah, dah. So the house committee digs up the original request for proposals to build the solid rocket boosters. And it includes the phrase, “It is imperative and all considerations of the proposal that effort be made to minimize production and operating costs while maintaining reasonable design performance and reliability specifications.”
Sarah: They’re making a spaceship!
Mike: Exactly, and already they're nickel and diming in the third sentence of the request for proposals.
Sarah: Ah, if you're being unethically cheap about a spaceship, what are you spending money on?
Mike: And what's even worse, this is so much worse. There are four companies that put in a bid and NASA has to score each one of the companies on the expertise of their staff, their experience in doing this before, the realisticness of their bid, et cetera.
Sarah: Hotness.
Mike: Morton Thiokol, the winning company, scores the worst of all four of the bids.
Sarah: But are they the cheapest?
Mike: Exactly so, yes, because they're the cheapest NASA is just like, well, they sort of such, but they're the cheapest.
Sarah: So it's like when your dad goes out to buy you a bike for your birthday and you end up with a Spiderman bike for a child three years younger than you, because that was what the guy had that week.
Mike: Essentially, and this is how you get all of this jank balls, O-ring stuff. They're just getting the worst company. And there's all these problems. One of the most amazing things about the House report that doesn't come up in the Rogers commission report is that as early as 1979, they're showing problems with the O-rings.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Starting in 1979, NASA engineers, Morton Thiokol engineers, everybody is saying, you really shouldn't use O-rings on this because of this flexing issue that the rockets are flexing. O-rings rings aren't really good for this.
Sarah: Cause they're like, Hey, we're building spaceships.
Mike: Yeah. And what is clear by 1979, 1981 super early, is that you just need to find a better way to join these different segments of the rocket booster.
Sarah: The twist here is that the same thing that destroyed the Challenger is what killed American manufacturing generally, is that for years and years, people were like, we should a) not be doing the cheapest thing possible. And B) We should try to innovate in some way. And everyone was like, no.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's really amazing is that in the commission report, they're documenting all the time that people sent memos, people sent letters, people talked to their bosses about needing to find a different way to do this. And again, and again, the response is it's too expensive. We can't start from scratch now.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: The most damning one that they print in the house commission report is an actual letter from Morton Thiokol engineers to NASA, sort of a progress report. What are we up to this week? And they're looking at all these problems with the O rings. It says, “executive summary HELP!”. And it's in all caps and with an exclamation point
Sarah: Executive summary help.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Mike: Another thing that the house committee mentions is that there's been a lot of cost cutting and budget cutting at NASA. And a lot of people, the good people are leaving NASA because the salaries are really low. And so that's kind of a boring explanation, but I do think that these sorts of things really matter. If you can't keep technical and scientific people for a long time and give them something that's comparable with what they would earn in the private sector, you're just not going to have very good people. And really importantly, you're going to have high turnover.
So one of the things they mentioned is because of the low salaries, people don't stay for very long. So everyone who's working on this project at NASA is just churning through and there's no one who has the seniority to say, well, this is how we did it in Apollo. And this is how we should do it now. It’s just these new people coming in, they're mostly young, they're underpaid. They don't have the full view of everything. So all of this contributes to essentially the second explanation of the Challenger disaster. Basically incompetence. So the first explanation is that middle-management didn't convey the information upwards. The second one is, everyone just kind of sucks. The organization is just not very good at its job and is not taking any of these risks seriously. It’s just sort of bumbling through.
And so this idea that formed after 1986 of the organization is kind of doing its best, but it just is kind of dysfunctional and it's a bunch of millennials. They're not taking it seriously and they're underpaid and just sort of general government dysfunction, idiot managers type of thing. And then 10 or 15 years goes by, and this is where we meet Diane Vaughn, who is going to take us into the explanation for why the Challenger disaster is an example of white collar crime.
Sarah: Hello, Diane.
Mike: Hello, Diane. Diane is a sociologist. She's not a technical person. She started writing articles about this in the 1990s. And in one of her articles, she talks about how an entire academic field in the last 10 or 15 years has been built up around the Challenger disaster. It shows up in Harvard business school cases. And I found an article about the culture of politeness and why the Challenger explosion happened. I found one about toxic masculinity and the Challenger explosion. So whatever field you're in, economics or anthropology or whatever, everyone has their pet explanation for why the Challenger really happened.
Sarah: And it's whatever we think is most wrong with society, probably
Mike: Who am I to judge that, though?
Sarah: So you and I think it's capitalism, but other people could think it's, I don't know, perms.
Mike: One thing that Diane Vaughn mentions in the methodology section of one of her papers is that most academics are basing their interpretation of events on the Rogers commission report and the house committee report, right? These two sort of 200 and something page reports. She mentioned though, these are actually executive summaries, they're long, but the Rogers commission report is actually five volumes. It's more than a thousand pages long. And so is the House committee report. There are tons of additional archival material as appendices to these reports that very few people are reading. She also mentions even fewer academics look at the 200,000 pages of documents and interviews and transcripts that are held at the National Archives. And now that I've read all 200,000 pages, I have a different interpretation.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: You can hear the rap air horn, like pop, pop, pop.
Sarah: Oh, God bless her.
Mike: It's like receipts. She's essentially like, none of you guys are really reading all of this. She goes through the way the Rogers commission actually called witnesses that sort of bolstered its own version of events and a lot of people weren't called, and a lot of information wasn't included in the report. And so first of all, she uncovers a bunch of new technical details about the crash. I mean, obviously the O-ring failing, all of that stuff is true, but what really happened, what really caused the jet of fuel to shoot out of the rocket boosters was a gust of wind.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yeah. It's called the wind shear because it's really high altitude. The worst wind shear ever recorded on a space shuttle mission happened 50 seconds into the flight. If this gust of wind hadn't knocked off the silly putty, everything would have been fine. So this doesn't completely change the interpretation of events, but it's just like, okay, Diane, she knows what she's doing. We're in Diane's hands.
Sarah: Diane's got the whole world in our hands.
Mike: Another thing she mentioned that is important for all the political considerations that go into this is that before the Challenger launch, it had already been delayed four times. And one of the reasons why there was all this urgency to launch on that day was because people were really sick of the delays. They're like another delay, come on. We've already delayed this four times. We already know about the weather. What are we doing? There's also a really dark thing. That they were going to do it, I think it was two weeks previously, because vice president, George HW Bush was going to be there for the launch. And then they said, it looks like we've got a weather front coming in. Don't fly all the way down to Cape Canaveral. But then the weather front that they were expecting never came. It was perfect launch weather. And if they had launched on that day, nothing would have been a problem. So they postponed it essentially for political reasons. And then because he wasn't there, they were like, oh, I guess we've already delayed it. So let's just delay it again.
Sarah: The fact that it was delayed because of, what if he sees on our Instagram that we had the rocket launch anyway, that would be embarrassing.
Mike: It's a tragedy and you can never look back and counterfactuals and whatever, but it sucks, you know, it sucks. But the biggest thing that she says, and I think this is really important for understanding what was really going on, is that everyone puts all of this importance on the teleconference the night before, right? That if only the information had gotten up to the higher levels, they would have known that there were these concerns, and they would have acted differently. She says the central fact is that there's no evidence that they wouldn't have gone ahead with the launch.
Sarah: That is quite dark.
Mike: Even if they had known the concerns, they would not have acted any differently.
Sarah: I feel like this episode is like this truffle of American darkness. First layer is pretty dark, isn't it? And I'm like, yeah. And you're like, what about if we go to another layer and then another layer, and then it's a cure made of pure pointlessness and fear.
Mike: She says, “The infamous teleconference can only be understood as one decision in a long line of decisions that show an incremental descent into poor judgment.” So what she says is the real linchpin is not the teleconference, the real linchpin is the first time the rocket comes back with damage to the O-ring, and they just keep going. That's the key decision, right? That comes from above. That comes from the entire organization that is organized around, we must launch, we must launch. We must launch. The cost-cutting stuff is obviously bad and it's obviously a contributor to this, but the real damage, she calls it “ bureau pathological”.
Sarah: That's so good. Oh Diane.
Mike: This is what really made NASA bureau- pathological, was this huge incentive and this huge pressure from politicians, from Congress and from Reagan, to make space flight routine.
Sarah: Why?
Mike: It all comes out of this existential crisis that NASA was having after the Apollo missions, where Apollo missions went super well, everyone loves the space program. And then it's like, well, now what, what?
Sarah: So it’s like George Lucas trying to write a prequel?
Mike: I mean, exactly. Nixon had scrapped the idea of going to Mars, moon landings, sort of aren't as cool and they can't learn as much as they used to. And then what they're under pressure to do, it's not necessarily that they had to cut costs., it's this idea that they had to start to act like a private sector actor. So one of the things that's totally been overlooked in this is that the Challenger, the space shuttle itself, was selling cargo bays to private companies. So they could put in satellites, communication satellites and other things that needed to go up into space. There was this idea that you can make space flight commercially viable.
Sarah: Okay. And so there's just the feeling that NASA has to just become part of the private sector in a way. That’s very strange.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, we saw the same thing with the post office and the going postal episode. Every arm of the government sector has to start thinking like a business and has to start becoming more efficient. And so they had set the goal for NASA to have 60 shuttle launches a year. This was the goal that they were supposed to be working toward because it was supposed to become routine.
Sarah: But why, why do we have to have routine rocket launches? Why is this necessary? Is it like NASA is your Instagram friend who’s like January! Going to do the whole 30, whatever that is. And people who set endless rules for themselves. And you're like, what is the point of any of this? Why do we need to do 60 rocket launches a year? What would be different if we didn't do that? Because space travel isn't this spectacular new thing anymore, it has to become something like a bus.
Mike: I mean, that's the thing, that year, 1986, they had 15 launches scheduled. They wanted to just bang them out. And again, one of the reasons why they didn't want to delay the launch of the Challenger was because they had two launches coming up in the same month that had to be timed with the orbit of Jupiter. So one of the reasons they didn't want to delay was like, that's going to mess up our whole schedule for the year. And so this drive to produce and this drive to just get the shuttles out, that was impossible when you put safety at the center.
Sarah: I really don't think of NASA as big as having a board up on the floor saying, we have had an X number of days since a space accident, and someone has to wipe it off and write a zero on it.
Mike: And another really dark thing about this is taking Christa McAuliffe on the flight was one of the things that they wanted to do for political reasons to make space flight seem safe and routine. They wanted to get into this mode of look, normal people can go into space. This month it’s going to be a teacher, next month it's going to be a forest ranger. And the next month after that, it'll be another scientist. And so the word that Diane Vaughn quotes NASA administrators is saying a lot is ‘operational’. We know how to do this. We've done it a million times. It's super routine.
Sarah: It's not, you're just pretending like it is. And by pretending so hard. You're courting disaster.
Mike: Totally. And keep in mind that this is at a time of budget cuts too. It's do more with less. And a huge reason for this was they were also under pressure to contract more and more things out. So one of the things we forget about the Apollo missions is that everything was done in house. All of the scientists were NASA scientists, NASA badges, NASA employee cafeteria. It was all NASA all the time.
Sarah: Since I grew up watching Apollo 13, to me, it's like, well, NASA is a bunch of guys in a room, and they can all see each other and talk to each other. And they're in Houston, I guess. And if there's a problem, then they can all discuss it and figure it out. And then Tom Hanks comes home from space. No, these guys are manufacturing some of the parts in Utah. And it's so disincentivized to, because if you're already reluctant to bring up a concern you have to your boss, which people are reluctant to do generally, then you think about, what are the odds that he's going to talk to his boss? They're going to talk to the NASA people. The NASA people are going to talk. What are the odds of this going through four or five different little transistors in this big system? You're just much more likely to not say anything, I think.
Mike: And what Diane Vaughn says, and I think this is really crucial, is that one of the huge differences between later NASA and earlier NASA is that NASA scientists weren't doing science anymore. NASA scientists were doing project management. Once your organization starts outsourcing stuff, you, as a scientist, are not doing the primary work anymore, what you're doing is basically client relations, right? You're dealing with the contractor.
Sarah: There's like a novel to be written about a guy working for NASA in the eighties. And he's been there since the Apollo days. And now he just goes and gets drunk on his roof on the weekends. It's that kind of feeling of like, we used to make things.
Mike: Yeah. And then as a NASA person, you essentially become a NASA administrator. You don't necessarily know the engineers because they're in a different city or maybe you see them every once in a while, but they're kind of sucking up to you, right, because you are the source of funding. So you're not getting an on the ground view. Mostly what you're doing is you're applying checklists, and you're applying project management scheduling things, and you're making sure everything is flowing well, but you're not connected in the same way and that work is not as rewarding. So another reason why scientists were leaving NASA is because they're not trained as administrators. One of the things that Diane Vaughn mentions is that NASA is not a macho organist. These are nerds. These are people that are super safety oriented.
Sarah: Yes. That's why I've always liked NASA.
Mike: And so she talks about how a lot of the engineers said, I personally put safety number one, but the organization that I work in doesn't allow me to do that.
Sarah: So NASA at this point is like just a bunch of nerds with stomach aches.
Mike: Exactly. And also even the break between management and engineering is a little bit fake in that NASA did start bringing on more, you know, Harvard MBAs and business school types, but a lot of the managers in NASA were actually former scientists and engineers. They had worked their way up. So a lot of them were actually very safety conscious. And then a lot of the engineers had actually internalized this production mindset.
So she mentioned on the infamous teleconference, there's 14 engineers and only three of them didn't want to launch. So even within the engineers, they had absorbed all of the standards that had been handed down to them and were just like, Guys, we gotta meet these deadlines. We gotta meet the schedule. Because that's what they're being judged on all of a sudden.
Sarah: And they're used to continually having feelings of vague misgivings that they can't support to the degree that they have to make anything be different.
Mike: Yeah, and they’re being overruled. They're just used to being sort of shunted aside in favor of schedules.
Sarah: We gotta launch 45 other shuttles this week.
Mike: So yeah. So let's go. And you know, the Morton Thiokol engineers said, you know, Hey NASA, we shouldn't launch until it's 53 degrees. A reason why NASA didn't want to do that, wait until 53 degrees, was because then it establishes a standard for every future launch. So you're like, well, if we wait for 53 degrees on this launch, this becomes the standard. This is going to be a pain in the ass for all the other launches we have next year.
Sarah: So they're like, well, if we have to do the same thing, it will really undermine our other unsafe practices. So no.
Mike: This is from Diane Vaughan's book, “After the Challenger disaster, media reports charge that a can-do attitude at NASA contributed to the technical failure. That can-do attitude was not equally distributed throughout the organization.”
And that's a really important point, in that a lot of the engineers were slowly realizing, we're never going to do 60 launches a year. This is insane, right? We would need three times the staff, we would need 10 more years to even remotely get up to that schedule. But the managers were like, no, no, we have to do this. We have to put all this downward pressure. They were asking their engineers essentially to do something possible.
Sarah: That’s more than one a week. There were only 22 episodes of Cheers in 1986. Like let's put it in perspective that way.
Mike: Everything about the teleconference and everything that happened with the decision, no one was bending the rules, they were following the rules. And this to me establishes why this is white collar crime. When everyone is following the rules and something terrible happens, the fault is with the person who sets the rules. This is from the intro of Diane phone's book, and I think it's really crucial to understanding this interpretation. She says,
“In terms of individual accountability, middle managers were of course responsible, but their isolation in the spotlight deflected attention from the responsibility of top decision-makers who made political bargains, established goals, allocated resources, and made other key decisions that altered the structure in the culture of NASA.” So she's essentially saying that they transformed NASA from a research and development organization into a business.
Sarah: It was capitalism all along.
Mike: You're so happy.
Sarah: I am! I'm always happy because it just so clearly was capitalism. You can see the little capitalism of prints in the snow. Again, this is because something as intricate as a shuttle launch was turned into something that there were quotas for no reason. Except that in America, if we just don't want something to be in the middle ground between completely new and terrifying and exciting and brave and totally easy and seamless and taking a bus to Cleveland.
Mike: And this is another great phrase that Diane Vaughn has is ‘the normalization of deviance’.
Sarah: Ah, Diane, I like you.
Mike: That's essentially what the organization came to do, that all of these things that had been deviant. Why are the O-rings eroding by 30%? This became a sign of resilience. It became look, the O-rings are eroding and they're still working. Let's keep going, right? Look how great these O-rings are.
Sarah: This single mom has three jobs and sleeps in her car every night, but she's supporting her entire family. This is a sustainable situation.
Mike: It’s dark viral inspiration content. Exactly. The way that it's supposed to work is you don't launch unless you have great evidence that you should launch. And over time it becomes, we have to launch unless there's great evidence that we shouldn't right. The default became, we have to launch, and that's the heart of why this is an example of white collar crime. Because I don't feel comfortable blaming any of the individual engineers or any of the individual project managers, because everyone is doing what they're supposed to do. It's the system working as intended.
Sarah: And at every level and the sort of minuscule cost cutting levels and in the overall mission statement of, we're going to treat this as Quotidien and work a day a thing as we can, as we possibly can. And in a way that is very disconnected from reality, but that's what we're doing right now. This is such a Jurassic park type situation too, where it's like, you figure out how to clone dinosaurs, and then you immediately turn them into a theme park. And it's like, we've only been putting people in space since the sixties, slow down.
Mike: I know. And then the real epilogue to this is that she mentioned also that NASA essentially learned nothing from this because NASA also took the middle manager explanation and then they have another space shuttle that exploded in 2003.
Sarah: Was that it? Was that what happened?
Mike: This is why we don't have space shuttles anymore. So the organization has completely shifted to unmanned missions for good reason. It's essentially an acknowledgement of the fact that it might never be safe enough to send humans out. And also if we're going to get the space shuttle to the point where it's routine, fine, let's do it a hundred times without people on it. Let's make sure we are actually good at this, and it is actually routine and then we'll put people on it again. So now that we're all depressed, what note do we want to end on?
Sarah: You know, just that it's capitalism's fault as always, surprise.
Mike: Your tagline was so prescient.
Sarah: I don't know. I find it reassuring that it's the same mistakes over and over again. We're looking at the same kind of systemic flaws functioning in NASA that we see in episodes where we look at things that went horribly wrong in our legal system. It's never just an O-ring. It's never just this one thing that no one could have predicted. It's always this whole human structure that allowed for a blind spot big enough for the O-ring. I do think that finding out in the end that the problem is us is good news because we can, we can work on ourselves. I believe.
Mike: That's a nice, fake, optimistic note to end on.
Sarah: It’s not fake! I'm genuinely this uncertainly Pollyanna-like. It's scary, but true.