Unethical Decisions - The Causes of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster Roger Boisjoly
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- čas přidán 11. 04. 2020
- 1991 Roger Boisjoly P.E. presenting at the university of Minnesota about the causes of the space shuttle challenger disaster. the audio starts about 40 seconds into the video
Mr. Boisjoly, we lament your passing in 2012 very much. You displayed to the entire country exactly the kind of personal and professional integrity that is REQUIRED of a free people, at great personal cost to you and your family. I hold you as an example to all three of my children of the kind of ethical integrity that I expect from them, now and in their futures. I can only hope that your example of steadfastly adhering to a truth no one at NASA or MTI wanted to hear will permanently resound as an example of the best an engineer can aspire to - to present required information in the most clear and unbiased way possible, and standing on that truth once the assault begins from those whose interests are negatively affected by that information. You demonstrated this character repeatedly throughout your entire ordeal, and the fact that this gave you PTSD only proves that integrity. God bless you, sir
Absolutely right!!!
RIP Mr Boisjoly
Greetings from lake Titicaca Peru
Even today, companies, like mine, put production over safety. Roger B should have a statue
Roger Boisjoly, Allen McDonald, and Richard Cook all deserve to be commemorated at NASA for trying to keep the Astronauts safe and alive.
Great to see this presentation - and nice to see old style overhead projectors in use.
God bless this man. No wonder he wound up with PTSD. and F&$@ the psychopaths who dismissed him and his peers.
I blew the whistle on an unethical issue at my former employer and boy did I pay the price. But I’d do it all over again.
May Roger Rest In Peace. 🙏
I have been teaching Engineering Ethics at a major university for over 15 years in a format where an engineering instructor with industrial experience co-teaches with a philosophy instructor. The Challenger Disaster is our flagship case along with many others including, of course, the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse. Safety and whistleblowing are of great interest to students. You can question the ethics of the administration of the university if you wish, but I know that what is going on in our classrooms is designed to produce graduates that are ethical decision-makers.
Thank you for blowing the whistle. Good person.
Roger Boshule, Allen McDonald and the cost analysis guy that went to the new york Times should have some kind of a monument for what they did to get the truth out.
Heroes never die.
thank you for your action.
Boisjoly was an excellent and super knowledgeable person about the o rings. They should have listened to this man and stuck to the decision to not to launch
That is why politics don’t being in certain decisions. This was not a political decision by any means and yet it became political.
RIP Mr Boisjoly. You are man of great ethics. If only your bosses at MT listened to you.
Wow! The first question is so relevant today! How do we trust the universities to teach ethics when they themselves are just as unethical.
Exactly
There is no teaching ethics to psychopaths. No matter how good the teaching.
It is a pointless exercise.
bad people... very bad
Mr. Boisjoly warned NASA not to launch that cold morning on January 28th, 1986. But they did not listen.
Just superb.
That Q&A was intense and awesome!
The booster and the joints were fixed properly after the Challenger accident. The boosters still fly today on the SLS. They are not reused now, however.
The crew should’ve been included more in the briefings leading up to the launch, Maybe they were included but the O-Ring/cold temp dilemma wasn’t mentioned to them. I feel the flight crew should be able to weigh in on launch decisions especially when it comes to issues with the SRB’s or anything related to the shuttle for that matter. They should be made aware of any & all potential issues. I don’t care if your launch gets pushed back till next century B.C. , Nothing supersedes safety…
The crew was not included they were specifically excluded from the launch meetings.
I don't think mission control in Houston and launch control in Florida were fully informed of what happened the night before launch.
That's forsure!😔😌
Especially considering many astronauts are great engineers. Neil Armstrong was a pilot first, but he became an engineer before becoming a NASA astronaut. So, he would understand safety of the mission likely from the launch pad to the spacecraft he was going to be piloting.
This guy was a hero. And of course, his predictions came true when the second orbiter was lost.
Hang in there on this video, the audio kicks in around the 50 second mark.
Mr. Boisjoly was a tremendous man, a man of strong ethics and principle - which is more than can be said for those whom he went up against in this case!
On a side note, I come from Canada where we speak French as a second language. I find it interesting how in the States Mr. Boisjoly's surname is pronounced BEAU' - ZHO - LAY like the wine. The correct French pronunciation is actually BWA' - ZHO - LEE' . 😊 It literally translates as, "Beautiful Wood."
Boisjoly epitomized what P.E. should mean. His duty was to the ethics and standards of his profession.
As a Professional Engineer, ethics is extremely critical. They are important to mission safety and he wrote memos saying he knew the o-rings were not good enough for cold weather. He thought the shuttle would not make launch, but it only took 58 seconds for the mission to go awry.
Engineering principle that applies here: kids, don't play near the edge of a cliff but if you absolutely have to, wear a safety harness.
Mr Boisjoly here clearly showed the steep relationship between ambient temperature and the recovery time for these "complaint" seals (i.e. they were playing ON a cliff edge).
Second principle: if like Thiokol's lawyers apparently did, when your company's lawyers tell you to just answer yes or no and offer nothing extra, remember they're the company's lawyer not yours, you're the one testifying under oath, and as a professional you need to answer with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
One of the bravest men on the planet. It's difficult to watch the Rodger's Committee testimony and the men responsible for the terrible decision to launch that fateful day squirm and rationalize their decision making. Bob Lund stated he wasn't convinced temperature was a factor in o-ring failure. Would he have launched at 10 degrees...at zero degrees? Where was his cutoff point for comfort in saying go for launch. I would submit any reasonable person would say something vastly less low than the 25 degrees under their launch experience.
Man, they never had a chance…
Roger is an American hero
I love this man for tearing the, I'll call the person a heckler, heckler in the crowd seemingly probing him about the blame game and shoving fact after fact down this dudes throat.
The mission commander should also be able to scrub a launch, but I don’t think he had the information.
Roger Boisjoly said "we don't have crystal balls". Any man that stands up to both his employer and NASA the way that he did has cast iron balls. They should put a statue of him at the front gates of Kennedy Space Centre to remind all that enter what true engineering is.
Watching this, keep in mind this was over a decade before Columbia.
Way back at the very beginnings of the space program when they approached the top navy test pilots to become astronauts, some of them balked at the idea because instead of flying the thing, they would merely be passengers. A pilot does a walk-around and inspects his plane inside and out and has the final say on whether he flies it or not. Astronauts must rely on others to have the final say on whether they fly or not. I personally would not put myself in that position.
I am embarrassed to say that I am just now hearing about this man. He is a real deal
He knew about the Challenger being a disaster and tried many times to tell everyone, to no avail. He obviously had high ethical standards and went above and behind in his findings to prevent a disaster.
Now, the tragedy cost the lives of seven astronauts who were committed to their profession and that kind of damage is irreparable.
May this man Rest In Peace and may his findings and legacy continue.
Gosh. If only someone would of listened to him about titan
Keep in mind, the fundamentally wrong backwards seal design was never changed for the remainder of the program...1986 to 2010. Just added some heater elements as window dressing.
36 : 30 - he really makes his point well
Remember, at the time of the accident it was no longer NASA, it was the SSTA, space shuttle transit authority, nothing unethical, gotta keep them buses rolling. Space exploration officially ended with Apollo 17.
The Astronauts themselves all 7 crew members should be sitting there I bet they would of said don’t launch!
Poor Roger Boisjoly. Nobody had listened to you.
This is the first time after all these years later that I saw the redesign of the field joints.I always wondered what the fix was going to look like.
Why were they used in the first place? A solid "tube" makes more sense. In any case if you watch the Rogers commission testimony the whole thing sounds crazy. "Yeah, a little o ring erosion, no problem". They should have grounded the fleet once it became evident there was any blowby regardless of temperature. Really screwy.
@@tedpeterson1156 The O rings were used because Morton Thyacol was located in UTAH. The company had no access to a port to ship the Solid rocket engines by ship over the ocean. They had to be shipped by RAIL meaning they needed to be shipped in pieces. That required the field joints.
@@tedpeterson1156And the sad part is, the fox was well under 3 years it took to investigate the cause and what to do later.
BTW, if this was his presentation, there is no excuse for why they did not delay the launch until the temperature was 50 degrees Fahrenheit and above. 36 degrees was inexcusable if at 50 degrees the first o-ring failed and second o-ring also showed signs of failing.
Hailey's Comet would still be there when the launch of Flight 51-L, carrying SPARTAN-203, was delayed by a few days.
1:02:30 is compelling, concerning the topic of ethics. I wonder if ethics training at elite universities such as MIT has improved. Boisjoly was an incredible, ethical human being.
The problem is you can't train psychopaths in ethics,
its like trying to teach a shark to be a vegetarian.
@@EiziEizz welcome to America
NASA were the cause of the “accident” because they heavily pressured Morton Thiokol when they didn’t like the recommendation not to launch at the extremely low temperature that was out of the SRB safety operational range.
What a legend🎉
"And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" John 8:32
Two takeaways: 1st that NASA culture needed to change. It was proven again in the Columbia disaster, another engineering crisis that engineers had warned about previously-this time the crisis came about because of pressure from radical environmentalists that forced the the liquid booster engineers to come up with a safer foam insulation coating product but would not adhere as well as the original. The 2nd takeaway from this whole enterprise was that the Space Shuttle was so complex that it had multiple single failure points of engineering, that if one item failed would result in disaster to the flight without protection for the crew. The entire program was built on a premis that engineers could overcome every problem to make a rocket reusable but every mission was an exercise in crossing your fingers hoping it would survive. The space shuttle was epic financial and engineering failure and shines as just one more example of overreach and wishful thinking.
Not only with Columbia. Atlantis barley made it home one mission. From falling ice blocks like Columbia. It cracked the bottom of the heat shield leading to one panel burning through and as they described it the Most damaged Not only with Columbia. Atlantis barley made it home one mission. From falling ice blocks like Columbia. It damaged some 700 panels the heat shield leading to one panel burning through and as they described it the Most damaged launch vehicle to ever return to earth successfully.
STS-27. Just two missions after challenger
In reading Malcom McConnell's book about Challenger ( Challenger: A Major Malfunction, Doubleday 1987)...In support of your statement, Mr Fishman, on page 9 the author states over 700 pieces of hardware on the Orbiter stack were listed as 'Criticality 1' - which meant that the failure of any single ONE of those items would result in catastrophic loss of crew and vehicle.
The trump and player
The shout band
Welcome to the American corporate culture. I read a book; On a Clear Day you can see General Motors, by John Delorean. In it was one profound statement still true today: "It seemed to me, and still does, that the American system of business often produces wrong immoral and irresponsible decisions, even though the personal morality of the people running the businesses is above reproach. The system has a different morality as a group than the people do as individuals, which permits it to willfully produce ineffective or dangerous products, deal dictatorially and unfairly with suppliers, pay bribes for business, abrogate the rights of employees by demanding blind loyalty to management, or tamper with the democratic process of government through illegal political contributions." Was true of the auto industry back then, true with the Challenger disaster in the 80's, and still true today with corporations like Boeing. And really, is also true with the government, it's just as bad.
rayguns was responsible