Roger Boisjoly died last month. He was the Thiokol engineer who warned his managers (via written memo) about the potential for a space shuttle disaster six months before Challenger blew up; he vigorously opposed that disastrous launch; and he testified about all of that before the accident investigation committee. In the years since the disaster he had a second career as public speaker on the subject of engineering ethics.
I’ve heard from another former Thiokol employee who claimed that Boisjoly was not well liked by his colleagues because his actions made a lot of people look bad, and also because he used the disaster as a springboard for his career as an ethics spokesman.
Questions:
-Was there anything Boisjoly could have done differently (to alert management to the problem, and to oppose the January 1986 launch of the Challenger) that would not have made people look so bad? Or was his colleagues’ bitterness toward him a necessary consequence of him exercising his sense of engineering integrity/ethics?
-Only one other name appears on the memo he authored and delivered to management six months before the disaster. Were his colleagues unwilling to state their concerns in writing, or did he author/deliver the memo without their knowledge/input?
-What did his colleagues do to voice their concerns about the O-ring design, and their opposition to the disastrous Challenger launch?
I don’t think there’s anything he could have done better. The entire project was so steeped in politics that it’s a wonder anything got done at all. Management owes it to their engineers and to those whose lives depend on its success to be as responsive as possible to internal criticisms. Without knowing more, I have a hard time blaming other engineers for not coming forward–it is very easy to grow a hostile environment that causes backlash against whistleblowers.
Thanks for that link Dr. S. Really interesting reading. I clicked on the link before reading your final quote, sure enough, that was the line I was going to quote myself. He certainly had a way with words didn’t he?
Overall it epitomises what I think real genius is, taking a complex subject and distilling it into a few thousand dispassionate words with barely a sentence wasted. I know more about that disaster after 10 minutes reading than after 26 years of documentaries and news coverage.
What I did find rather chilling was this early quote.
Bolding mine. Did a similar investigation eventually cover the orbiter with equivalent rigour?
Indeed; Feynman is one of my personal heroes, both for his ability to explain and for his strength of character.
I don’t know. Even supposing they did, though, it’s obvious that NASA did not really learn its lesson, because the Columbia disaster demonstrated the same kind of creeping acceptance of defects. NASA knew about the shedding foam, and even that it could cause serious damage, but every flight that didn’t end in disaster simply served to convince them that it wasn’t a problem after all.
This attitude isn’t so bad when taking about, say, space probes, where one can accept some risk in pushing the envelope. It’s not acceptable when lives are on the line.
It is also worth noting that Thiokol is based in Utah. Average number of children/household pretty high. Kids and mortgages tend to make for meek employees.
Something else common in Utah tends to make meek employees also. But I don’t think the engineers should be held responsible for the shuttle disaster, at least not in their capacity as engineers. This was clearly a management and political problem, whether or not those managers and politicians were engineers.
It’s not clear to me what “colleagues” means here–whether it’s just his engineer peers or also includes management and junior engineers.
It doesn’t change my point, at any rate. It is management’s responsibility to foster a non-hostile workplace culture. If engineers felt that honesty put their jobs on the line, it is the fault of management for causing that belief.
Is feeling that your job is threatened a valid excuse for withholding safety-critical information? No, of course not. But it’s easy to imagine an engineer (perhaps a junior one) who notices something amiss, but keeps his head down because he’s not 100% confident in the analysis and the last guy who did this was fired because he incurred $500k in testing expenses and turned out to be wrong. It is again the responsibility of management to foster an open environment where engineers are not afraid to speak up.