Bob Ebeling was anxious and angry as he drove to work on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. He kept thinking about the space shuttle Challenger, cradled on a Florida launchpad 2,000 miles away. Ebeling knew that ice had formed there overnight and that freezing temperatures that morning made it too risky for liftoff.
"He said we are going to have a catastrophic event today," recalled his daughter Leslie Ebeling, who, like her father, worked at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol and who was in the car in 1986 on that 30-mile drive to the company's booster rocket complex outside Brigham City, Utah.
"He said the Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die. And he was beating his hands on the dashboard. … He was frantic."
The night before, Ebeling and other Morton Thiokol engineers tried to convince NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that launching in cold weather could be disastrous. The Thiokol engineers had data, documents and photographs that they believed provided convincing evidence of the risks. And Thiokol executives agreed, at first. Their official recommendation to NASA: Do not launch tomorrow.
What happened next is a story now 40 years old. But it includes critical lessons for the space program that are still relevant today. It has also been a lingering source of guilt for some of the Thiokol engineers who "fought like hell to stop that launch."
"A catastrophe of the highest order"
A problem with Morton Thiokol's booster rocket design emerged during the second shuttle flight in 1981. After that Columbia mission, and after Thiokol's reusable booster rockets were retrieved from their ocean splashdown, an inspection by company engineers showed evidence of "blow-by" in a rocket joint.
The rockets were built in segments, like tin cans stacked on top of each other. Where one segment joined another, two rows of synthetic rubber O-rings were supposed to keep extremely volatile rocket fuel from leaking out. Liftoff and early flight exerted enormous pressure on the rockets, causing the joints to twist apart slightly. The O-rings were supposed to keep those joints sealed. But on that second shuttle flight, searing-hot rocket fuel and gases burned past that inner O-ring barrier in a phenomenon known as blow-by.
Five years and two dozen shuttle missions later, Morton Thiokol had a special task force working full time on O-ring blow-by. One engineer on that task force, Roger Boisjoly, wrote a memo six months before the Challenger disaster that warned of "a catastrophe of the highest order — loss of human life" if the O-ring problem wasn't fixed.
Shuttles continued to launch despite the ongoing risk. Some blame that on something called the "normalization of deviance," a concept coined by sociologist Diane Vaughan in 1996 after she studied the Challenger disaster. Vaughan concluded that even after the risk was identified and even while it was the focus of concern and study, shuttle flights continued because the risk hadn't yet caused a disaster. The "deviance" of the O-ring blow-by became normalized.
A teacher teaching from space
Five days before Challenger's 1986 launch, the shuttle's crew of seven arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, pausing on the tarmac before a gaggle of microphones. Commander Dick Scobee spoke first, followed by pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka and Ronald McNair, and payload specialist Gregory Jarvis. The seventh crew member was Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from New Hampshire.
"Well, I am so excited to be here," McAuliffe said, smiling broadly. "I don't think any teacher has ever been more ready to have two lessons. … And I just hope everybody tunes in on Day 4 now to watch the teacher teaching in space."
McAuliffe's participation was attracting more attention than usual to shuttle flights at the time. Before this Challenger mission, shuttle launches were so routine that the three major broadcast television networks stopped covering launches live. NASA decided that putting a "teacher in space" aboard would boost interest.
It worked, to a point. The broadcast TV networks didn't carry the launch live, but teachers in classrooms across the U.S. rolled out TV sets so millions of schoolchildren could watch live feeds from CNN or NASA. Busloads of students were also in the crowd at Kennedy Space Center, along with the families of some astronauts.
"It's time to ... put on your management hat"
Bob Ebeling and other company engineers were watching at the Morton Thiokol booster rocket complex in Utah. They crowded into a conference room with Thiokol managers and executives; all focused on a large projection TV screen.
The night before, in the same conference room, Ebeling and his colleagues had tried to convince NASA booster rocket program managers phoning in from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama that the cold weather made launching risky. The synthetic rubber O-rings lining the booster rocket joints stiffened in cold temperatures, and this would be the coldest launch ever by far. The Thiokol engineers feared blow-by would burn through both sets of O-rings, triggering an explosion at liftoff.
At first, Thiokol's engineers and executives officially recommended a launch delay. But the NASA officials on the line pushed back hard. The launch had already been delayed five times. The NASA officials said the engineers couldn't prove the O-rings would fail. One of those engineers, looking back on it now, 40 years later, says it was an unachievable burden of proof.
"It's impossible to prove that it's unsafe. Essentially, you have to show that it's going to fail," explains Brian Russell, who was a program manager at Morton Thiokol in 1986 and who was focused on the O-rings and booster rocket joints.
"What we were saying was we're increasing the risk significantly," Russell recalls. But "you just can't" prove the O-rings will fail, he adds. "So, we were in an absolute lose situation."
NASA's resistance during the contentious, sometimes argumentative conference call eventually wore down the four Thiokol executives in the Utah conference room. They and the NASA officials on the line also heard one piece of data that fed their resistance. O-ring blow-by had also occurred during a warm launch: 75 degrees.
"So, it wasn't just as easy as saying, 'Hey, we were on a rock-solid foundation with no opposing data.' We weren't," Russell remembers. Russell also says the data showed that damage at colder temperatures was far more severe and alarming.
Thiokol had a lot at stake with this Challenger launch. The company's contract with NASA imposed a $10 million penalty for a launch delay due to the booster rockets. That contract was worth $800 million, and it was up for renewal in 1986.
The Thiokol executives put NASA on hold so they could speak privately with their engineers. Russell, Ebeling, Boisjoly and another engineer in the room were insistent. It was too risky to launch, they said. Finally, Thiokol Senior Vice President Jerry Mason polled the company executives. He and two others quickly agreed to reverse their earlier recommendation and approve the launch. Mason then turned to Bob Lund, the vice president in charge of engineering.
"And Bob hesitated and hummed and hawed, and I could tell it was such a difficult decision for him, and it was all hinging on him," Russell recalls. "He was representing both management as well as engineering … and in his hesitation, Jerry Mason said, 'Bob, it's time to take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.'"
And that's precisely what Lund did. He put on his management hat and voted to overrule his engineers. Challenger's fate was set.
A major malfunction
The next morning, NASA's live feed showing launch preparations included this announcement from the launch control team: "I have polled the technical community, and you have our consensus to proceed with this launch. Good luck and Godspeed."
Brian Russell, Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly knew that wasn't true. They were part of the "technical community," and they never backed down from their recommendation to delay. But the launch director and other top NASA officials didn't know it. All they knew was what the lower-level officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center told them: Thiokol and its rockets were "go" for launch. At the time, that's all that was expected. The Marshall Space Flight Center supervised Thiokol's booster rockets, and the Marshall officials simply told the launch control team that the boosters were ready.
Leslie Ebeling watched the launch with her dad and the other engineers in the Thiokol conference room. The elder Ebeling and a few others expected a disastrous explosion at ignition. So when Challenger lifted off and cleared the launch tower, there was some relief. But not for Bob Ebeling.
"My dad bent down to tell me that it wasn't over yet, that things weren't clear. And I could feel him trembling," recalled Leslie Ebeling. Then launch control announced, "Challenger, go with throttle up."
Suddenly, there was a moment of static on the audio feed, along with billowing smoke and flames in the video, as well as pieces of the spacecraft shooting wildly across the sky. "Obviously a major malfunction," said a voice on the NASA feed.
"And then he wept, loudly," Leslie Ebeling said of her dad's response. "And the silence in that room was deafening. There was no one talking. It was just dead silence."
In the crowd at Kennedy Space Center, a TV camera and microphone captured screams and sobbing, and the faces of Christa McAuliffe's parents as they looked skyward in anguish. A loudspeaker with the NASA feed confirmed the worst: "We have a report relayed through the Flight Dynamics Office that the vehicle has exploded."
That night, CBS News anchor Dan Rather called it "the worst disaster in the U.S. space program ever."
"Tonight, the search for survivors turned up none," Rather continued. "The search for answers is just starting."
"I fought like hell to stop that launch"
A special presidential commission began investigating a week after the tragedy but initially failed to get the full story from NASA witnesses. At the first public hearing, on Feb. 6, Judson Lovingood, a shuttle manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, provided a truncated description of the conference call with Thiokol.
"We had the project managers from both Marshall and Thiokol in the discussion," Lovingood testified. "We had the chief engineers from both places in the discussion. And Thiokol recommended to proceed in the launch."
Lovingood added that there was some concern about the cold temperatures in the forecast, but that's all he said. There was no mention of the objections of the Thiokol engineers, so the commission moved on.
Four days later, in a hearing behind closed doors, Lawrence Mulloy, another top official at Marshall, said, "We all concluded that there was no problem with the predicted temperatures."
But this time, one of the Thiokol engineers was in the room.
"I was sitting there thinking, 'Well, I guess that's true, but that's about as deceiving as anything I ever heard,'" recalled Allan McDonald in a 2016 interview. He was the immediate supervisor of the Thiokol engineers.
McDonald was sitting in the back of the room, in what he called the cheap seats, and unable to restrain himself, he spoke up.
"I think this presidential commission should know that Morton Thiokol was so concerned, we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and we put that in writing and sent that to NASA," McDonald remembers saying.
"I'll never forget Chairman William Rogers and his vice chairman, Neil Armstrong, standing up and squinting and looking at me, and Chairman Rogers said, 'Would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard?'"
The forecast for overnight temperatures for the Challenger launch ranged from 18 to 26 degrees Fahrenheit. The air temperature was still only 36 degrees after a two-hour launch delay.
Four days later, in another closed-door hearing, the commission heard the first formal testimony from Thiokol engineers. McDonald told the commission that Thiokol was pressured by NASA to approve the launch. Roger Boisjoly, who led the eleventh-hour effort to delay the launch, testified about the O-ring task force, including his warning of a catastrophe six months before.
Little of this testimony was public. Bits of closed-door testimony leaked, but not the dramatic details of the decision-making process that failed to heed dire warnings of a disaster. Those details were finally revealed on Feb. 20, 1986, in a pair of stories for NPR's Morning Edition, reported by my colleague Daniel Zwerdling and me.
We managed to get two Thiokol engineers to provide a play-by-play account of the conference call the night before the launch, including direct quotes. Both engineers remained anonymous at the time. They feared for their jobs, and they'd been ordered by Thiokol not to talk publicly about the incident. They also declined to be recorded. But they allowed us to report what they said. Decades later, NPR was permitted to publicly identify them both.
"I fought like hell to stop that launch," a tearful Boisjoly told Zwerdling in a hotel room near the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 19, three weeks after the explosion. "I'm so torn up inside I can hardly talk about it, even now."
"I should have done more"
At the same time, 1,700 miles away in Brigham City, Utah, Bob Ebeling spoke with me. He was still frantic, pacing back and forth between his kitchen and living room, shaking his head and wringing his hands.
Both Ebeling and Boisjoly provided identical stories about that conference call.
When the Thiokol engineers argued that NASA should wait for warmer weather, Marshall's Lawrence Mulloy blurted out, according to Ebeling, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?"
NASA was trying to prove the space shuttle could fly on a regular and reliable schedule, and in every month of the year, despite cold weather. Mulloy later told the Challenger commission that he didn't believe he was applying pressure that night before the launch.
"Any time that one of my contractors … who come to me with a recommendation and a conclusion that is based on engineering data, I probe the basis for their conclusion to assure that it is sound and that it is logical," Mulloy testified.
But Mulloy's comment, which he did not deny making, proved pivotal. It preceded the decision of the Thiokol executives to overrule their engineers.
Ebeling told me that he saw in the local newspaper a photo of graffiti on a railroad overpass that said, "Morton Thiokol Murderers." He then walked into the living room, where haunting images of the Challenger explosion appeared in a TV news report.
"I should have done more," Ebeling then said. "I could have done more."
Lessons learned
The Challenger commission concluded it was "an accident rooted in history," given the evidence of O-ring damage before the fatal launch and the failure to heed the warnings of the Thiokol engineers.
The commission also documented a shocking gap in the Challenger launch decision: the failure of the lower-level officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center to tell the launch control team that there were serious concerns about launching. At a hearing on Feb. 27, Commission Chairman William Rogers posed a key question to the Challenger launch director, the Kennedy Space Center director and two top shuttle program executives.
"Did any of you gentlemen prior to launch know about the objections of Thiokol to the launch?" Rogers asked. Each of the four top NASA launch officials responded with a "No, sir" or "I did not."
"Certainly, four of the key people who made the decision about the launch were not aware of the history we've been unfolding here before the commission," Rogers concluded.
NASA changed the launch decision process after the Challenger disaster so that objections of contractors would reach the launch control team.
But, still, 17 years later, after another shuttle, Columbia, disintegrated during its Earth reentry, a NASA investigation blamed, in part, "organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion."
Columbia and Challenger prompted NASA, as well as one of the Thiokol engineers, to systematically remind space agency officials, workers and contractors about key lessons from Challenger and other disasters.
The lessons from Challenger are critical for "the next generation of spaceflight," said Michael Ciannilli recently, who retired from NASA after 36 years at the space agency, including in a key role in launch decisions after Challenger. Ciannilli also developed and implemented an "Apollo, Challenger, Columbia Lessons Learned Program" at NASA, which has involved thousands of NASA employees and contractors.
"The folks in the organizations have to feel it's not just platitudes or a nice slogan. But that's really how it is. … We honor dissenting opinion. We welcome dissenting opinion. There's no ramifications," Ciannilli says.
He left NASA as the agency shed 4,000 workers last year, but he says he'll continue his "lessons learned" work as a contractor.
NASA also invited me to speak about my reporting on Challenger to project and safety managers at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Langley Research Center in 2017. My assigned topic: "Listening to Dissent."
Former Thiokol engineer Brian Russell has been taking a similar message to mission management teams and other NASA officials at the Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, NASA headquarters and the Marshall Space Flight Center (twice) — all since April 2025.
"The people that are involved in the programs today face the same issues. They face the same pressures when it comes to wanting to launch," Russell explains.
"They're going to be under the pressure to perform, and no one wants to be the one to stand up and say, 'I'm not ready,'" he continues. "But the listening under high-stress environments like that is really crucial, and that's the crux of our message."
"You have to have an end to everything"
Still, Russell has some lingering regret about his role in the effort to stop the Challenger launch. He recalls the moment in 1986 when the Thiokol executives overruled the engineers, reconnected the conference call and told the NASA officials that Thiokol was "go" for launch.
"The thing that I feel the most guilt over … [is] I wish I'd have said, 'There's a dissenting view here.' I wish the [NASA] people on the phone call would've heard that," Russell says, his eyes filling with tears. "But I still didn't speak up. So, I regret that … to this day."
Roger Boisjoly told me in an interview in 1987 that he had no regrets. "There's nothing I could have done further because you have to realize we were talking to the right people. … We were talking to the people that had the power to stop the launch."
Boisjoly blamed Thiokol and NASA. He later became a leading voice for ethical decision-making in the engineering and leadership worlds. Boisjoly died in 2012.
Allan McDonald, the engineer who first spoke out during an early Challenger commission hearing, was initially demoted and sidelined by Thiokol. But members of Congress vowed to make sure the company would never receive another NASA contract if it punished McDonald and the other engineers for speaking out. Thiokol relented, and McDonald was put in charge of the successful redesign of the booster rocket joints. "That turned out to be the best therapy in the world," he told me in 2016. McDonald died in 2021.
Bob Ebeling carried deep and painful guilt for 30 years. In 2016, he told me that putting him on that conference call with NASA the night before the launch was "one of the mistakes that God made." It was something he prayed about.
"[God] shouldn't have picked me for that job. … But next time I talk to him, I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me? You picked a loser.'"
Ebeling was 89 then and had home hospice care. He used parallel bars to walk from his kitchen table to his favorite easy chair in the living room.
I reported his painful regret in a story on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and hundreds of NPR listeners responded, including all kinds of engineers. Most had comforting words. Two of the key people who were involved in the 1986 conference call, and who did not heed the warnings of the engineers, also responded, saying Ebeling provided data and documents. They told him that he did his job and was not the decision-maker, so he should not bear any blame.
NASA also responded with a statement, which I read to Ebeling in February 2016: "We honor [the Challenger astronauts] not through bearing the burden of their loss but by constantly reminding each other to remain vigilant and to listen to those like Mr. Ebeling who have the courage to speak up so that our astronauts can safely carry out their missions."
Hearing that, Ebeling smiled, raised his hands above his head and clapped. "Bravo! I've had that thought many times," he said.
"You have to have an end to everything," he added before I left, as he clapped and smiled again.
Bob Ebeling died three weeks later, at peace, his family said.
Transcript
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Here at NPR, we've been following the news unfolding of the Minneapolis protests, including the recent shooting and killing of a 37-year-old man Saturday morning by federal agents. That's the third shooting and second death in Minneapolis involving federal immigration officials in January. We'll bring you more details on that developing story when UP FIRST returns tomorrow.
I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. On the morning of January 28, 1986, Bob Ebeling was anxious and angry as he drove to work to the Morton Thiokol booster rocket complex outside Brigham City, Utah. He knew that 2,000 miles away at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ice had formed on the launch pad that cradled the space shuttle Challenger. Seven astronauts, including a civilian - a high school teacher - were set for lift off that morning. Ebeling believed their lives were at stake. His daughter, Leslie, was in the car with him.
LESLIE EBELING: And he said, we are going to have a catastrophic event today.
RASCOE: The night before, Ebeling and his Thiokol colleagues, all booster rocket engineers, argued for a launch delay. They said the freezing weather overnight could cause a catastrophic failure in the booster rockets that would lift Challenger towards space.
L EBELING: And he said the Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die. And he was beating his hands on the dashboard. He was frantic.
RASCOE: But in Florida, all systems were go. The NASA launch control team declared Challenger ready to fly.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED LAUNCH CONTROL MEMBER: I have polled the technical community, and you have our consensus to proceed with this launch. Good luck and Godspeed.
RASCOE: Except that wasn't true. There wasn't consensus among the technical community to proceed. But the launch director and other top NASA officials didn't know this. They didn't know that Ebeling and other engineers at Morton Thiokol had told other NASA officials it was too risky to launch.
Today on The Sunday Story, we look back 40 years ago this week at that desperate 11th-hour effort to keep the space shuttle Challenger grounded, at the resistance to heeding those warnings, at a persistent and crushing burden of guilt for some of those involved, and at lessons learned from the Challenger disaster which continue to resonate today.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
BOB EBELING: If they would avoid it one day, discussion here would be completely different.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: We'll be right back.
I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is The Sunday Story. And today, we're looking back at the Challenger disaster of 40 years ago. With us is retired NPR correspondent Howard Berkes, who investigated the decision to launch that day back in 1986. He and another NPR journalist were the first to report in detail on the desperate last-minute efforts to delay Challenger's liftoff. Howard, welcome back to The Sunday Story.
HOWARD BERKES: It's always good to be with you, Ayesha.
RASCOE: Thank you so much. So, I mean, Howard, I have to say, we're looking at the anniversary that is 40 years old, but I'm also 40 years old, so I don't have any personal memory of when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. And there are a lot of people in my generation and younger. It's, like, it's history - right? - to us. But you were a part of that history. And I can say I didn't know that till today (laughter). But I'm learning something. You were living it in real time. So take us back to 1986. Like, what was at stake for the space program with that Challenger launch?
BERKES: You know, there was so much at stake, Ayesha. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was desperate to prove that space shuttles could literally be like shuttle buses, you know, rocketing skyward and returning to Earth on a regular and reliable schedule. And to do that, to carry into space these commercial, scientific and even secret military payloads, they had to prove they could launch in every month of the year on both warm days and cold days.
RASCOE: So how common had space shuttle flights become by January 1986? That was when the Challenger was scheduled to launch.
BERKES: You know, by then, shuttles had been flying for five years, and there had been more than two dozen missions, but delays plagued the program a lot. This was a highly technical spacecraft, after all, with thousands of complex components. So a lot could go wrong. Plus, there were other uncontrollable variables, like the weather. In fact, this Challenger launch had already been delayed five times.
RASCOE: OK. So it sounds like NASA was really struggling with reliability in the shuttle program, especially when dealing with elements out of their control, like weather and all this stuff.
BERKES: No, that's right. But still, you know, shuttle flights had become routine enough by 1986 that public interest had waned. In fact, the three major television broadcast networks at the time had stopped covering shuttle launches live. Only cable news networks, CNN and NASA's satellite feed were set to go live for this Challenger launch. And, Ayesha, the lack of major network coverage was likely concerning to NASA because public attention and enthusiasm were important to assure continued funding of the space program.
RASCOE: And Challenger was set to have a teacher on board, Christa McAuliffe, who taught high school in New Hampshire. Was her participation part of NASA's effort to attract more attention to shuttle flights?
BERKES: Absolutely, and it worked. There was enormous attention to the process of picking a teacher in space. There were 11,000 applicants, after all. And when Christa McAuliffe came out on top, her astronaut training attracted even more attention. Several days before the Challenger launch, McAuliffe stood before a gaggle of microphones in a royal blue astronaut jumpsuit at the Kennedy Space Center. She talked about her plans to teach the loftiest lessons ever.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRISTA MCAULIFFE: Well, I am so excited to be here. I don't think any teacher has ever been more ready to have two lessons in my life. I've been preparing these since September, and I just hope everybody tunes in on Day 4 now to watch the teacher teaching from space.
RASCOE: Oh, my goodness. I mean, it does sound so exciting. And because I am a kid of the '80s, I remember a "Punky Brewster" episode where they showed that kids around the country were watching the launch on TV 'cause, like, this is, like, educational. So now all the kids in the, you know - in school rooms, they could be watching, like, a teacher teaching from space.
BERKES: Yeah. Teachers had rolled out TV sets in classrooms all across the country so that the kids, one, could watch the launch live, and then later watch these first-ever lessons from space with a real teacher. And there were also busloads of schoolchildren in the crowd watching the launch at the Kennedy Space Center.
RASCOE: OK. So at this point, the Challenger launch had already been delayed five times. And so you got this teacher on board. People are excited. That is going to not look so great, to have all those delays. It seems like there would be a lot of pressure on NASA to get the Challenger off the ground this time.
BERKES: There absolutely was a lot riding on getting Challenger launched.
RASCOE: So let's get back to the morning of the launch, Howard. Remind us, like, what happened. And I have to say, I'm dreading it because I heard the teacher. She sounds so happy. But I know this is not a happy story.
BERKES: It's not. And it's so, so sad to hear her voice in this context. So let's go back to January 28, 1986. Schoolchildren and space enthusiasts around the nation have their TV sets tuned in. And at the Morton Thiokol complex in Utah, company executives and the booster rocket engineers crowded into a conference room to watch the launch on a large projection TV screen. Bob Ebeling was there along with his daughter, Leslie.
And just the night before, Ebeling and a few other Thiokol engineers had been in the same conference room on a conference call with officials from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The Thiokol engineers tried to convince those NASA officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center that the unusually cold weather in Florida could cause a booster rocket joint to fail. They thought Challenger would explode right at ignition. So you can imagine the tension and fear as they watched the launch countdown. And again, here's Bob Ebeling's daughter, Leslie.
L EBELING: They had the countdown.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: T-minus 10 seconds...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: T-minus 10, nine, eight, seven, six. We have main engine start. Four, three, two, one and lift off. Lift off of the 25th space shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.
L EBELING: And my dad bent down to tell me that it wasn't over yet, that things weren't clear.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Engines beginning throttling down now at 94%.
L EBELING: And I could feel him trembling.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Challenger, go at throttle up.
UNIDENTIFIED ASTRONAUT: Roger. Going to throttle up.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Obviously, a major malfunction.
L EBELING: And then he wept loudly.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: We have no down link.
L EBELING: And the silence in that room was deafening. There was no one talking. It was just dead silence.
(SHOUTING)
BERKES: At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a TV news camera and microphone focused on the crowd, including the faces of Christa McAuliffe's parents as they looked in anguish skyward.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: We have received - we have a report, relayed through the flight dynamics officer, that the vehicle has exploded.
(CRYING)
RASCOE: The shock and the grief, it's so visceral and so overwhelming. Even now, 40 years later. And there were so many people who witnessed this tragedy, like, live, like, people in the crowd, school children watching in classrooms, the families of the astronauts aboard Challenger.
BERKES: It is impossible for us to imagine the depths of grief for the families of Commander Dick Scobee, Pilot Michael Smith, Mission Specialists Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik and Ronald McNair, Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis and Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe. And as you note, Ayesha, this was also a collective national catastrophe. Generations were scarred that day, and those not watching live as it happened were subjected to a tsunami of TV news reports with horrific images of billowing smoke and flames and pieces of the spacecraft shooting across the sky.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
TOM BROKAW: NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Good evening. Tonight from Washington, D.C. It was a nightmare.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: The worst disaster in the U.S. space program ever.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Space Shuttle Challenger is destroyed. Just a little more than one minute after...
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Tonight, the search for survivors turned up none. The search for answers is just starting.
RASCOE: So, Howard, it sounds like the engineers, at least, already knew what happened.
BERKES: They were sure they knew what happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BERKES: They knew that those frigid overnight temperatures could cause synthetic rubber O-rings in Challenger's booster rockets to stiffen and not fully seal the rocket's joints.
RASCOE: So what are these O-rings and the joints, like, how do they work?
BERKES: The shuttle booster rockets were stacked in segments. Think of them like tin cans stacked on top of each other. They were filled with highly volatile solid rocket fuel. Now, where those segments met, there were two rows of synthetic rubber O-rings and they were designed to keep that fiery rocket fuel from shooting out sideways at the joints. Lift off and early flight produced enormous pressures on those booster rockets, and those forces tended to pull the joints apart slightly.
The O-rings kept the joints sealed, so the burning fuel went down out of the bottom of the rocket lifting the spacecraft skyward.
RASCOE: But I thought you had said that the shuttle program was trying to prove that shuttles could launch in both warm and cold places. So, had there been previous cold-weather launches?
BERKES: There had been launches that were relatively cold, cold enough to stiffen those rubber O-rings. Remember, rubber will stiffen when it gets cold. And before Challenger, the coldest launch had happened a year earlier when chilly temperatures had cooled the rocket joints to 53 degrees. And during that launch, the O-rings on two joints had failed to fully seal. Searing rocket fuel and gases burned past the first row of O-rings and scorched the second.
RASCOE: Why weren't those leaks catastrophic?
BERKES: That's because two sets of O-rings provided redundancy. The second set was there in case the first set burned through. And in this case, the second set held. But remember, on this morning in Florida in 1986, it was well below freezing, much, much colder than any flight before. And that had the Thiokol engineers worried that both rows of O-rings could fail. That's why they formally recommended a launch delay. NASA's booster rocket project managers at the Marshall Space Flight Center pushed back hard for hours until Thiokol executives overruled their engineers and told NASA it was OK to launch after all.
RASCOE: OK. So the executives buckled under the pressure?
BERKES: That's certainly what it looked like to their engineers.
RASCOE: The tragedy of this is that the Thiokol engineers were right. Did the rest of the world learn, you know, quickly about these O-rings and the cold temperatures and that there was this effort to stop the launch?
BERKES: Small bits of the story leaked out, but it would be about three weeks before the complete story came out. That's because nobody at NASA and Thiokol talked about it. At least they didn't talk about it publicly. Thiokol had ordered their engineers to keep quiet. NASA seemed to downplay - some would say cover up - the fact that the Thiokol engineers had warned it was too dangerous to launch.
RASCOE: So what happened in those days after the explosion?
BERKES: Well, just six days after the explosion, President Ronald Reagan established a special Challenger Commission to investigate the accident. And three days after that - we're at February 6 now - the Commission held its very first hearing. And that day, only NASA officials testified, and one of them was Judson Lovingood of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He was on that 11th-hour conference call with Thiokol.
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JUDSON LOVINGOOD: We had the project managers from both Marshall and Thiokol in discussion. We had the chief engineers from both places in the discussion, and Thiokol recommended to proceed in the launch.
RASCOE: So that was a half-truth - right? - and where I come from, you know, they say a half-truth is really a whole lie, but I don't want to put that on them. I don't want to put that on them, but, like, the Thiokol executives had said they were ready, but the engineers had said they weren't.
BERKES: That's right. And Lovingood did add that there was some concern about the cold temperatures, but that's all he said. And the Commission moved on from there. No, that wasn't really what you would call full disclosure. Now, four days later, there was another closed-door hearing at the old executive office building next to the White House. And at that point, another NASA official from the Marshall Space Flight Center simply said this, quote, "we all concluded there was no problem with the temperatures."
But this time, one of the Thiokol engineers was in the room. Allan McDonald was sitting way in the back in what he called the cheap seats, he told me, in an interview in 2016.
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ALLAN MCDONALD: I was sitting there thinking, well, I guess that's true, but that's about as deceiving as anything I ever heard. And after two or three minutes, I couldn't restrain myself anymore, so I raised my hand. I said, I think this presidential commission should know that Morton Thiokol was so concerned, we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. And we put that in writing and sent that to NASA.
I'll never forget Chairman William Rogers and his vice chairman, Neil Armstrong, standing up, kind of squinting and looking at me, and Chairman Rogers said, would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard?
RASCOE: So this was a hearing without reporters present, right? So that was a revelation that was not publicly revealed.
BERKES: That's right. And four days later, there was another hearing. Again, this one was also behind closed doors. This time, the Commission finally heard formal testimony from two of the Thiokol engineers, Allan McDonald, who we just heard from, and Roger Boisjoly. Now, Boisjoly led that 11th-hour effort to wait for warmer temperatures. McDonald testified that Thiokol was pressured by NASA to approve the launch.
Boisjoly told the commission he'd been part of a special task force at Thiokol that was focused on the O-ring problem for a long time in advance of Challenger. In fact, he wrote a memo six months before the Challenger launch that warned of a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life, if the O-ring issue wasn't fixed.
RASCOE: It's hard to imagine a more powerful warning. Like, people are going to die if you don't fix this. So why, with disaster like that predicted, did shuttle flights continue, especially in freezing weather?
BERKES: Some people say this was due to something called the normalization of deviance. That's a phrase coined by sociologist Diane Vaughan in 1996 after she studied the Challenger disaster. And simply put, this is what it means. When a threat is recognized and defined, and even when it begins to be addressed, as long as nothing disastrous results in the meantime, decision makers tend to continue to operate, despite that ongoing threat.
RASCOE: So, Howard, when did you and your NPR colleague, Daniel Zwerdling, begin to investigate this?
BERKES: About three weeks after the disaster. You know, I was based in Utah in 1986, and I had heard a brief local news story which said that Thiokol was coerced into approving the launch. So I made a few phone calls. That resulted in a tip and a name, Bob Ebeling. I called Ebeling at home and he answered but he said, don't quote me. Don't name me. No, I don't want to do an interview. They'll fire me. But Ebeling was clearly upset as he confirmed that Thiokol was coerced - that was his word - into approving the launch.
Then two other Thiokol engineers were named in news stories - Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly. Bits of their closed-door Challenger Commission testimony leaked. It was February 19 then, 22 days after the tragic launch, and that's the day I teamed up with my NPR colleague, Daniel Zwerdling.
RASCOE: So what did you and Zwerdling do, exactly, to find out those things that weren't public yet, like those unreported details of the failed effort to stop the launch?
BERKES: Zwerdling had learned that Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly was in a hotel room near the Marshall Space Light Center in Alabama. So he hopped on a plane. At the same time, I drove to Brigham City where most of the Thiokol workers lived and I went right to the public library.
RASCOE: So now, I mean, why did you go to the public library? Like, what was up with that?
BERKES: Remember, this was 1986. We didn't have laptops or the internet or Google to search for home addresses and phone numbers. We had names of Thiokol engineers and executives, so I poured through telephone books stacked in the public library to get their home addresses and phone numbers. I then drove around Brigham City knocking on doors. One door opened - at Bob Ebeling's house.
RASCOE: But Ebeling wouldn't talk to you, like, on the phone when you had called earlier. So why did you think he would talk to you that day? Is it different when you're in person? Like, you know, as a reporter-reporter, it's different when you show up at the house?
BERKES: Well, you know, we reporters like to say that 90% of journalism is showing up because, like you say, when you show up face-to-face, often that has more impact than phoning somebody when it's much easier to just simply say no and hang up. So I showed up. I did ask Ebeling 30 years later why he decided to talk to me that day in 1986.
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B EBELING: That's my engineering background coming out. Somebody should tell the truth. I think that the truth has to come out.
BERKES: But getting to that truth in 1986 wasn't easy. First, I got into the house because Ebeling wasn't home from work yet, and his wife, Darlene, let me in. You know, in 1986, we didn't have cellphones, and I hadn't talked to my NPR editor in Washington for hours. So I asked Darlene Ebeling if I could use their phone, and she said yes. After checking in with my editor, Darlene offered me some water. She was friendly and hospitable, and we sat at the kitchen table and chatted.
RASCOE: And so you stayed in Bob Ebeling's kitchen until he got home?
BERKES: I did. You know, I wasn't asked to leave, and if I had been asked to leave, I would have left. But, you know, we sat there and talked until Bob Ebeling got home, and he was not happy to see a reporter sitting at his kitchen table. But he was also still frantic. He paced back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, wringing his hands, shaking his head and complaining that Thiokol was unfairly blamed for the Challenger explosion.
And then he unloaded. He started to give me a detailed account of what happened the night before the launch. He had direct quotes with names. And again, don't record me, he insisted. Don't name me. But he agreed to let me report what he was saying anonymously. And here's an excerpt from my story the next morning. So this is February 20, 1986, on NPR's Morning Edition.
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BERKES: Last night he read in the local newspaper that vandals scrawled a phrase three-feet high across a railroad overpass. Morton Thiokol murderers, it said. The engineer shakes his head, rises and walks into another room to watch a television report, but turns away when that haunting image is shown again. I should have done more, he says. I could have done more. I'm Howard Berkes in Brigham City, Utah.
RASCOE: I mean, so that's Bob Ebeling blaming himself for the disaster, for the deaths of these seven astronauts, including the teacher, Christa McAuliffe. That has to be such a burden to carry. So what about his colleague, Roger Boisjoly, in Alabama? What was he saying?
BERKES: Boisjoly wouldn't open his hotel room door, at least at first, but he and Daniel Zwerdling talked through the door, and Zwerdling could hear Boisjoly sobbing. And Zwerdling told him the world wouldn't learn the truth unless he opened up, and he finally did. Now, neither of us knew it at the time, but Zwerdling was getting the same story I was hearing at Bob Ebeling's kitchen table, the same details, the same names, some of the same direct quotes.
And when we finally checked in with each other later in a conference call that we had with our editor, we discovered how identical these accounts were. We knew we had a powerful untold story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: When we come back, how that story revealed what really happened behind the scenes as the launch neared.
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DANIEL ZWERDLING: Thiokol executive Bob Lund wraps up the presentation to NASA with the company's official recommendation - do not launch the shuttle tomorrow.
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RASCOE: Stay with us.
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RASCOE: We're back with The Sunday Story, and I'm speaking with retired NPR reporter Howard Berkes. Howard, you had two unnamed sources back in 1986. They weren't on tape. Was there any hesitation at NPR about going with a story with those sources not named?
BERKES: There was. You know, the general ethical policy at NPR back then was pretty simple. Don't quote unnamed sources unless you have three of them confirming the same story, and we only had two. So I was sent back out to knock on more doors in Brigham City, while Zwerdling wrote what was essentially a play-by-play, a story with a minute-by-minute account of what we both had learned from Boisjoly and Ebeling.
And I had no luck getting a third source. So our editor made the decision to go with what we had. You know, their accounts were identical. And what they told us, it was too important. We had to report it. So the next day, Zwerdling's story aired with mine on Morning Edition.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ZWERDLING: A Morton Thiokol engineer sits before me, his eyes getting red with tears. "I fought like hell to stop that launch," he says. "I'm so torn up inside, I can hardly talk about it, even now."
BERKES: And at this point, Ayesha, I want to walk you through in more detail some of what we learned from Ebeling and Boisjoly. Boisjoly said that the day before the launch, the forecast for freezing temperatures in Florida prompted Thiokol engineers and managers to pull together data, charts and photographs showing what happened to booster rocket O-rings in cold temperatures. That then led to the 11th-hour teleconference, the concerted effort to stop the launch the next morning. Here's Zwerdling again, reporting what happened next.
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ZWERDLING: They all agree that it's too risky for the shuttle to take off. 8 p.m. They call NASA officials over a special telephone conference network, and one by one, four key Thiokol engineers lay out the troubling evidence. Point number one, both NASA and company engineers have known for several years that when the shuttle starts to take off, tremendous forces work the joints where sections of the solid rockets fit together and some of those crucial seals don't work right.
BERKES: Point number two, the colder the weather, the worse it gets.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ZWERDLING: Thiokol executive Bob Lund wraps up the presentations at NASA with the company's official recommendation - do not launch the shuttle tomorrow. The NASA officials listening on the telephone lines are shocked. "I am appalled," says George Hardy of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "I am appalled by your recommendation." Another top Marshal official, Larry Mulloy, argues with the Thiokol engineers. He challenges their figures.
He says the company doesn't have firm enough proof that the seals will fail in cold weather. But Thiokol engineers vehemently disagree, at some points almost shouting with anger. They insist that NASA should postpone the launch until the weather climbs into the 50s. And at that point, according to one engineer, NASA's Mulloy exclaims, "my God, Thiokol. When do you want me to launch? Next April?"
RASCOE: I mean, that sounds like a pivotal moment because here you have this NASA official, Lawrence Mulloy, and he seems mainly focused on the impact of the delay than on the ability to fly in cold weather.
BERKES: That's right. You know, that statement certainly set the tone for what came next. The Thiokol executives then decided to put the NASA officials on hold so they could talk to their company engineers privately. And the engineers were still insistent. But the Thiokol executives, after hours of challenges and resistance, decided to reverse the earlier recommendation of a delay. They overruled their own engineers and said the booster rockets were ready to go. And in his anonymous interview with Zwerdling, Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly recalled his experience the morning of the flight.
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ZWERDLING: When the shuttle lifted off the pad, he says, I thought, gee, it's going all right. It's a piece of cake. And when we were one minute into the launch, a friend turned to me and he said, oh, God, we made it. We made it. Then a few seconds later, the engineer says, the shuttle blew up, and we all knew exactly what happened. I'm Daniel Zwerdling in Huntsville, Alabama.
RASCOE: So how did NASA and Thiokol respond to your reporting at that point? I assume that you reached out to them for comment.
BERKES: We did, and they did not respond back then. But six days after our stories aired, the Challenger Commission heard about something from our reporting from something Bob Ebeling told me. There was that dramatic quote from NASA booster rocket program manager Lawrence Mulloy, when he said, you know, my God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April? Mulloy defended himself during commission questioning.
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LAWRENCE MULLOY: Now, that has been interpreted by some people as applying pressure. I certainly don't consider it to be applying pressure. Anytime that one of my contractors who come to me with a recommendation and a conclusion that is based on engineering data, I probe the basis for their conclusion to assure that it is sound and that it is logical.
RASCOE: OK. So that's Mulloy, you know, kind of downplaying the impact of the statement or trying to explain it from his position. But I'm wondering, like, why did the Thiokol executives give in on this? Was there a lot at stake for them and their company with this launch?
BERKES: Oh, boy, was there, Ayesha. Under Thiokol's contract with NASA, a launch delay due to the booster rockets triggered a $10 million penalty. And that booster rocket contract was valued at $800 million. And that contract was up for renewal in 1986. So, yeah, these Thiokol executives had a lot at stake, and their decision to back off a delay produced another dramatic moment that night down at the Kennedy Space Center involving Allan McDonald. He was the immediate supervisor of the Thiokol engineers. And he told me in an interview in 2016 that he was expected to sign in person the company's official launch approval document.
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MCDONALD: That was the reason I was at the cape, because it required that a senior official be at the cape to approve or disapprove a launch if something came up. And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime. I refused to sign it. I just thought we're taking risks we shouldn't be taking.
BERKES: So back in Utah, a Thiokol executive signed the launch approval document, and it was faxed to NASA.
RASCOE: And so, Howard, since you're reporting with Daniel Zwerdling in 1986, you've learned more about the dynamics of that teleconference, and you've stayed in touch with four of the key Thiokol engineers in the decades since the disaster.
BERKES: That's right. And, you know, with each conversation over the years, there was something surprising. We reported 40 years ago that the NASA program managers were not convinced it was too dangerous to launch, and I've since learned more about one piece of data presented in the 1986 conference call that fed their resistance. There was one shuttle launch before Challenger with what was called blow-by, which is burning rocket fuel and searing gases getting past an O-ring. But that launch, it was really warm that day. The temperature was, like, 75 degrees. That was not a cold-weather launch.
BRIAN RUSSELL: And that then was a conflicting piece of data that said, hey, temperature doesn't make a difference.
BERKES: This is Brian Russell. He was one of the Thiokol engineers on that 11th-hour teleconference call. We talked about this recently.
RUSSELL: And so it wasn't just as easy as saying that, hey, we were on a solid - a rock-solid foundation with no opposing data. We weren't.
BERKES: But there were lives at stake in the arguments you were making.
RUSSELL: Yes. (Crying) And we knew it.
BERKES: Here, Russell's eyes welled with tears as he recalled what happened next the night before the launch. The NASA officials were still on hold waiting. Thiokol senior vice president Jerry Mason pushed his executive team in Utah for a final decision.
RUSSELL: And finally, Jerry Mason said, we've plowed this ground before.
BERKES: Mason asked three top executives, should we launch or not? The first two said yes. Then he turned to Bob Lund, the Thiokol vice president in charge of engineering.
RUSSELL: And Bob hesitated and hummed and hawed, and I could tell it was just such a difficult decision for him. And it was all hinging on him. He was the final vice president in the room, and he was representing both management as well as engineering. Engineering's saying, we should delay, management now saying that we should launch. And in his hesitation, Jerry Mason said, Bob, it's time to take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.
BERKES: And that's precisely what engineering executive Bob Lund did. He put on his management hat and voted to overrule his engineers. Thiokol was go for launch. Challenger's fate was set.
RASCOE: When we come back, NASA leadership faces tough questions.
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WILLIAM ROGERS: Did any of you, gentlemen, prior to launch, know about the objections of Thiokol to the launch?
DICK SMITH: I did not.
GENE THOMAS: No, sir.
ARNIE ALDRICH: I did not.
JESSE MOORE: I did not.
RASCOE: Stay with us.
We're back with The Sunday Story, and I'm speaking with NPR - well, with retired NPR correspondent Howard Berkes. Howard, there's also something else that was hinted at in your reporting in 1986, but it wasn't fully explained then. Thiokol engineer Bob Ebeling told you that NASA lost its code of conduct that night before the launch. Have you learned more about what that meant?
BERKES: I have. You know, that was a reference to a launch decision standard that NASA routinely applied when it surveyed its contractors before a launch. That standard was different that night. This is how Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly described it to me a year later in 1987, in an interview that was on tape and on the record.
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ROGER BOISJOLY: I mean, we were put in a position of proving that it was not safe to launch. That was totally unheard of before this flight. We were always being put in a position as a contractor or proving that it was safe to launch.
RASCOE: So that is a change in the burden of proof that contractors like Thiokol have to meet. What difference does that make in assessing, like, the readiness of booster rockets for launch? Why does it make a difference if you're proving whether it's safe to launch or whether you're proving it's not safe to launch?
BERKES: You know, that's what I asked former Thiokol engineer Brian Russell when I interviewed him recently.
RUSSELL: It's impossible to prove that it's unsafe. Essentially, you have to show that it's going to fail. What we were saying was, we're increasing the risk significantly. We shouldn't be doing that. And so that's what we're really arguing for when we're saying prove it's safe. You don't fully prove it. But to go the other way, you just can't do it. And so we were in an absolute lose situation.
BERKES: And there was another shocking revelation in a commission hearing a week after our story aired. This was in testimony from four of the most senior NASA officials responsible for launch decisions. Here's commission chairman William Rogers questioning Kennedy Space Center director Dick Smith, launch director Gene Thomas and top NASA executives Arnie Aldrich and Jesse Moore.
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ROGERS: Did any of you gentlemen, prior to launch, know about the objections of Thiokol to the launch?
SMITH: I did not.
THOMAS: No, sir.
ALDRICH: I did not.
MOORE: I did not.
ROGERS: Certainly four of the key people who made the decision about the launch were not aware of the history that we've been unfolding here before the commission.
RASCOE: How can that be? Like, how does that happen? These top NASA officials, the people with the final word on launching Challenger, and they didn't know that the Thiokol engineer said it was too dangerous to launch, why didn't that critical information get to them?
BERKES: Back in 1986, the launch director and other top NASA officials were actually isolated from the final reviews for major components of space shuttles. Those reviews were conducted at lower levels by each NASA center responsible for each component. And so any issue with Thiokol's booster rockets was handled by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. And the Marshall officials told the launch decision makers that the boosters were ready to go, and that was all they said. This failure to communicate significant problems to the highest levels was supposed to change after Challenger.
RASCOE: I'm wondering about the four Morton Thiokol engineers we've heard from today. I know that you've kept in touch with some of them for decades. What happened to them after this monumental moment in their lives?
BERKES: They had dramatically different reactions to their places in history. Allan McDonald was sidelined and essentially demoted by Thiokol. That angered some members of Congress, and they threatened Thiokol. Punish McDonald and the other engineers, they warned, and Thiokol will never receive another NASA contract. So Thiokol relented, and McDonald was then put in charge of what became a successful redesign of those booster rocket joints. That included an additional O-ring and a heating element to keep the joints warm. He spent most of the rest of his career at Thiokol.
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MCDONALD: If I'd have been lamenting, like the rest of them were, about what else I could have done, I probably would have end up in the same place. But I focused my energy to make sure that it never could happen again. And that turned out to be the best therapy in the world.
RASCOE: So what did Allan McDonald mean when he said, you know, lamenting, like the rest of them?
BERKES: He was talking about engineers who were more deeply affected, like Roger Boisjoly, for example, who suffered physically and emotionally. He had disabling depression, double vision, sleeplessness, severe headaches. Boisjoly never went back to work at Thiokol and, in fact, he sued the company. He didn't feel that he failed. He blamed Thiokol and NASA. This is how he explained that to me in 1987.
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BOISJOLY: I have flashes still. I wondered if I could have done anything different, but the comfort that I have as a result of asking myself that question is that, no, there's nothing I could have done further because you have to realize that we were talking to the right people. We were talking to the people that had the authority. We were talking to the people that had the power to stop the launch.
BERKES: And Boisjoly went on to become a writer and lecturer on ethical decision making and engineering. He was honored for that by one of the world's biggest scientific organizations. He's featured to this day in leadership and engineering school curricula. Boisjoly died in 2012. And his wife, Roberta, then agreed to allow us to name him as one of our anonymous sources in our 1986 reporting.
RASCOE: And I know from your reporting since then that Bob Ebeling had a very different long-term response to Challenger. He couldn't let go. And he said to you in 1986, I could've done more - I should've done more. That seemed to define the rest of his life.
BERKES: Yeah, Bob Ebeling also suffered physically and emotionally for decades. He retired after Challenger. And he did spend a lot of time volunteering at a wildlife refuge near his home. In fact, he helped restore the refuge after flooding from the Great Salt Lake nearly destroyed it. He was actually honored for that work by the president at the White House. And I thought that would help him get past his lingering sense of guilt about Challenger, and I was wrong.
Ten years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger launch, I drove an hour from Salt Lake City to his house in Brigham City. And, you know, the same house, the same kitchen, the same living room, the same kitchen table. Little had changed, including Bob Ebeling.
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B EBELING: Had they listened to me and wait for the weather to change, it might've been a completely different outcome. If they would avoid it one day, discussion here would be completely different.
RASCOE: Ebeling sounds really frail there. But he still sounds so focused and affected by what happened that night in 1986.
BERKES: He was still deeply affected, and he was very frail. He was then 89 years old. He had hospice care. And he used a set of parallel bars to get from the kitchen table to his favorite easy chair in the living room. He still bore that weight of guilt, which is something he prayed about.
B EBELING: And I think that was one of the mistakes that God made. He shouldn't have picked me for that job. I don't know. But next time I talk to him, I'm going to ask him, why me? You picked a loser.
RASCOE: Oh, my goodness. After all of those years, he's blaming himself and so deeply and painfully just taking on the responsibility of this tragedy. It's just beyond sad.
BERKES: You know, I did another story which included that comment. And when it aired, hundreds of NPR listeners responded the same way. We were inundated with emails and letters, most with messages of comfort for Ebeling. We heard from all kinds of engineers. They told him he did what engineers are supposed to do, provide the facts and data. The final decisions belonged to the decision-makers. But Ebeling was stuck on who he hadn't heard from. This is what he and another daughter, Kathy, told me on a return visit.
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B EBELING: You aren't NASA. You aren't Thiokol. I haven't heard any of those people.
KATHY EBELING: He's never gotten confirmation that he did do his job, and he was a good worker, and he told the truth.
BERKES: So I reached out to a few of the Thiokol and NASA people who rejected the engineers' arguments in that 11th-hour teleconference in 1986. This is 30 years later now. And George Hardy responded. Remember, he was the Marshall Space Flight Center deputy director who famously said he was appalled at the push for a launch delay.
But he wrote this to Ebeling - you and your colleagues did everything that was expected of you. You should not torture yourself with any assumed blame. I also reached out to former Thiokol executive Bob Lund, and he called Ebeling. Now, remember, Lund put on his management hat before overruling the engineers. And he told Ebeling, you did all that you could do. I contacted NASA, and a spokeswoman there sent me a statement. So I drove back to Brigham City to read that NASA statement to Ebeling. It first referred to the Challenger astronauts.
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BERKES: (Reading) We honor them not through bearing the burden of their loss but by constantly reminding each other to remain vigilant, and to listen to those like Mr. Ebeling who have the courage to speak up so that our astronauts can safely carry out their missions.
B EBELING: (Clapping) Bravo. I've had that same thought many, many times.
BERKES: And finally, after 30 years, Ebeling seemed to let go. He smiled. He put his hands over his head and clapped some more. And I asked him if he had something to say to the people who wrote to him.
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B EBELING: Thank you. You helped bring my worrisome mind to ease. You have to have an end to everything.
BERKES: And he was still clapping when I left that day. A few weeks later, Bob Ebeling died at peace, his family said.
RASCOE: I mean, that is just a remarkable change and a blessing for Ebeling and his family from you and your work. What about the other Thiokol engineer that we've been hearing from, Brian Russell? He's the last of those four engineers still alive?
BERKES: That's right. Allan McDonald died in 2021. And like McDonald, Russell was involved in that successful redesign of the booster rocket joint. And he stayed at Thiokol and the aerospace company that later absorbed it until 2015. But he still harbors some doubts about his role that night 40 years ago, especially after the Thiokol executives voted to overrule Russell and the other engineers and approve the launch. Now, remember, when the Thiokol executives got the NASA officials back on the line, they simply declared Thiokol's booster rockets ready to fly.
RUSSELL: The thing that I feel the most guilt over, and the thing I wish so badly I'd have said, I wish I'd have said there's a dissenting view here. (Crying) I wish the people on the phone call would have heard that. And - but I still didn't speak up. So I regret that.
BERKES: To this day?
RUSSELL: To this day.
BERKES: Now, Russell is addressing his own lingering sense of guilt by directly connecting a critical lesson from Challenger to the space program today - the importance of listening to dissent, of listening to the people who are telling you what you don't want to hear. In the past year, Russell has been a featured speaker at NASA headquarters, at the Kennedy Space Center, at the Johnson Space Center and at the Marshall Space Flight Center. There, twice, he's told the story of the Challenger launch decision to mission management teams and other agency leaders.
RUSSELL: The people that are involved in the programs today face the same issues. They face the same pressure. When it comes to wanting to launch, they're going to be under the pressure to perform, and no one wants to be the one to stand up and say, I'm not ready. But the listening under high-stress environments like that is really crucial, and that's the crux of our message. I think these things need to be repeated. I think human nature is that we tend to forget about things in the past.
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BERKES: NASA has also had an internal series of presentations for thousands of engineers and mission management teams as well as contractors, and that includes Boeing, SpaceX and Blue Origin.
MICHAEL CIANNILLI: You have to be vigilant. Every day, you've got to make sure that the message is being sent to the workforce.
BERKES: This is Michael Ciannilli who developed and ran the NASA Lessons Learned program that focused on the Challenger, Colombia and Apollo disasters.
CIANNILLI: The folks in the organizations have to feel it's not just platitudes or a nice slogan, but that's really how it is. You know, we honor dissenting opinion. We welcome dissenting opinion. There's no ramifications. Maybe lose a little time, maybe cost a little extra, but it's far short of having another accident.
RASCOE: Howard, I know that NASA, like, you know, many other government agencies, had massive budget and staff cuts last year. Close to 4,000 people left the agency, according to some reports. Will this focus on Lessons Learned from Challenger and other disasters continue when you have, like, budget cuts and staff cuts like this?
BERKES: Well, Michael Ciannilli, who ran that Lessons Learned program, is among those who left. He took early retirement in September, but he'll continue as a contractor, he tells me, and he says his Lessons Learned talks will continue. I should add, though, that NASA did not respond to our multiple interview requests or to direct questions about the space agency's plans for this Lessons Learned program. So 40 years after Challenger, the lessons of that fateful launch decision are clear. Less clear is how NASA itself will keep them alive.
RASCOE: Well, Howard, thank you so much for bringing us the history of this Challenger disaster and really, the unspoken heroes who did try to make a difference, and thank you for your important work.
BERKES: Thank you, Ayesha, for giving me the opportunity to talk about it all again now.
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RASCOE: Howard Berkes is a former correspondent with the NPR investigations team, but he can't seem to stay retired, and we're so happy about that because he is truly a reporter's reporter.
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RASCOE: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt. It was fact-checked by Jane Gilvin. Our engineer is Robert Rodriguez. The Sunday Story team also includes Justine Yan and Liana Simstrom. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. The 1986 NPR reporting on the Challenger launch decision was edited by Anne Gudenkauf. Howard's 2016 reporting about Thiokol engineer Bob Ebeling was edited by Robert Little and produced by Nicole Beemsterboer. Ayesha Roscoe and UP FIRST is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.