The engineers did know. They raised concerns 12 hours before they took off. Thiokol Morton management ignored their own engineers and bowed to the intimidating pressure put on them by nasa.
All these comments are very correct.The engineers tried everything to stop the launch.Its sad that two of them passed away.Roger B. Being the most knowledgeable of the engineers.He reacted with his experience and his huge heart.He truly cared about the Challenger crew.He knew the outcome.
The engineers knew and told the management to postpone the launch, thats what happen when the management thinks they know better than the engineers. And mop Malloy never went behind the bars ( jail )
If you're truly interested in this subject read Dr Diane Vaughan's book "The Challenger Launch Decision." Reading that book even changed the way Wayne Hale (STS flight director extraordinaire) looked at the accident and the personnel involved.
If I remember correctly from my engineering ethics class. They had partial failures of these o-rings in the past. So even under ideal conditions they would be partially burned through after launch.
Yes they showed soot around them a lot BUT, there is something that you do not know or realize. Warmth and cold. In freezing cold weather it hardens, and in warmth they are flexable. That area when the blasted NASA Manager shot down was in the shade and the main box frozen in ice, with ice cycles. It was in a minus degree area, not in the thawing degrees of heat that it needs to do its job. When my father, mother and I watched as part of his creation went up, the shock of it exploding shook dad to his core. I held him as he cried, I asked him to explain to me what happened. He had recorded the shot so we looked at it again. He asked me if I saw the flare on the right side just a split second before the explosion, I told him yes because I'd seen that just when the shuttle was going for throttle up. He told me that that was where he designed the o rings to be and where they were placed. While in the Air Force he was loaned out to NASA for two years and built Woomera Station in Australia. He was a brilliant man. He was asked to do some designing on the Shuttle, that was where he did the o rings. In the frozen state that they were in, in the area of the 2 fuels they did not have a firm seal to keep the ice and the burning outer tanks from mixing. The throttle up brought up the secondary fuel up to burn from the shuttle. The o ring was not flexable and did NOT have that critical area sealed off. Water and fuel don't mix, they explode. Thus the shuttle exploded. He wanted to kill the manager for his outright neglance and money grubbingness. That manager was a MURDERER. If the shuttle had been allowed to thaw Challenger would not have exploded because the fast thawing ice would NOT have gotten into the fuel mixture. This is the area that had to be re-designed, so it would not happen again if that area was iced over in future flights. Take an o ring and put it in the freezer overnight. Take it out and in one hand squeeze it and in your other hand take an o ring not frozen and squeeze at the same time as you squeeze the frozen. A tiny test but you will see what I mean. My father was a devestated man. He was so tense when the next shot was finally made, but he could not forgive the man who caused the accident just so that money would not be lost in government contracts. I thank God that he retired early after getting a 15 million dollars law suit against him by one of the victims family. He was NOT an asset to NASA but a tragedy.
Yes. However those previous burn-throughs had never fully compromised the second o-ring. It was there specifically as a redundancy because it was impossible to guarantee that the first o-ring would provide sealing at ANY TEMPERATURE. In previous flights, there had been varying levels of thermal effects. In some cases, it was simply some minor scorching to the primary o-ring that did not effect the secondary at all. This was expected, as the o-rings were designed to interact with the combustion gasses. As stated, they would only seal if combustion gasses exerted pressure on them. In other launches, however, it was noticed that the primary o-ring had been compromised and that thermal effects had reached the secondary o-ring. Not good, but that’s what the secondary was there for. it was noted by the engineers at Morton-Thiokol (manufacturers of the SRBs) that the depth of combustion gas penetration correlated to lower launch temps: I.e if they launched at high temps, thermal effects were constrained to the primary o-ring. At lower temps, the primary o-ring was compromised and thermal effects reached the secondary. As the head engineer of the SRB program said “We knew there was a cliff, but we didn’t know exactly where it was” and recommended not launching at anything less than 53 degrees F. However, because previous o-ring failures had NOT resulted in any disasters prior, a psychological phenomenon called “normalization of deviance” set in. This is the idea that the more often you encounter an anomaly that doesn’t result in poor outcomes, the more you accept the anomaly as normal and acceptable, even when the anomaly is not expected or within design parameters. It’s a moving of the mental goal posts as to what is acceptable. That’s what happened with temperatures and o-ring failures. The o-rings were failing, but never catastrophically so. Decreasing temps increased failure, but never to the point of disaster, so the bottom limit of acceptable launch temperatures kept dropping. “Oh, well the launch succeeded at X degrees, so it’s fine to launch at X-1.” Then when X-1 succeeds, they go to X-2. And this system continues to work…right up until it doesn’t. This is the exact same phenomenon that led to Columbia’s destruction. Just replace “launch temp and o-rings” with “foam shedding”. I do take exception with the one presenter characterizing the disaster as resulting from poor communication. It wasnt poor communication. Morton-Thiokol said in no uncertain terms that the Challenger shouldn’t launch. They didn’t miscommunicate: they were knowingly ignored. SIDE NOTE: What often isn’t mentioned in Challenger analyses, but brought up by the head of engineering for the SRBs was that there was a chance the Challenger actually COULD have survived despite the failure of the O-rings. When the burn through first occurred right at engines start (when the first puffs of black smoke are visible), the combustion products burned through the O-rings and contacted the extremely cold steel SRB casing. This caused the products to flash-freeze in the gap and form an “in-situ ceramic seal” that plugged the hole. It’s the reason you see the puffs of smoke at launch, but it takes nearly a minute for the burn through plume to appear. In that intervening time, the frozen product seal did the job of the destroyed o-rings. However, this launch was the first time the jet stream was over the cape, and thus the shuttle encountered higher than average wind sheer events during ascent, one of which was strong enough to shatter the ceramic seal and restart the gas leakage. While not guaranteed, had the jet stream not been over the cape, it’s possible that fortuitous ceramic seal might have held long enough for the SRBs to complete their burn, and thus Challenger would have survived.
@@nogi2167 I really wonder if NASA would have taken the burn though seriously if the ceramic seal held. Knowing them, they would've just called it a "feature." Moreover, the launch was on a far colder day than the previous failures. And the meeting the night before had FINALLY certified a minimum acceptable temperature 54 Fahrenheit vs the late teens/early 20s of that morning, that as history shows fell on deaf ears.
I lived in Plant City, FL when the Challenger exploded. Plant City is close enough to the Kennedy Space Center that we could see the shuttles go up. I was in... third or fourth grade. Every shuttle launch we would go outside and watch. I saw it explode. I remember not understanding what happened -- I just knew my teacher was freaking out. We went back inside where it was explained.
My father when the design work was being done for the shuttle, before it was ever built, was on loan from the Air Force to NASA. He built Woomera in Australia and he designed part of the shuttle. His part was in the area of the detonation when Challenger exploded. The o rings, all of the designers knew that they were important, and, they worked for so many years and flights without a problem, until that day. My father was in shock for days. These managers KNEW what ICE DOES to that area of the shuttle, but THEY WERE TOO GOD DAMNED ANXIOUS to get the shuttle OFF THE GROUND with the teacher inside instead of scrubbing the mission to another but warmer day that they SENT THE SHUTTLE UP WITH ICE ON HER. It was too God Damn COLD for a mission AND TOO DANGEROUS. I put the blame solely on the managers for that needless accident. If it had not been so cold and iced up that accident would NEVER have happened. THAT MISSION SHOULD HAVE BEEN SCRUBBED. May those managers BURN IN HELL for what they did.
I love the little blue glow where the bell cooling fuel ignites off to the side.. how that pressure difference pulls it around.that escaping atmosphere
January 28th was the coldest day of the year (23F) at the launch site Kennedy Space Center, which is East of Orlando. The normal low on that day was 51F. It doesn't freeze much in Central Florida. the people who made the decision to launch didn't know what they were talking about. and they ignored the engineers who did. and the haste to launch was of course all about money.
No that’s the BUlss shii version. The reality is that no one talks about is the white house called nasa management and browbeat them about embarrassing them on such a high profile mission and nasa management felt they had no choice. Of course the politicians needed a scape goat so they made management that scape goat. The engineers themselves said this was the first time management went against a recommendation so they didn’t know how to handle it. The reason why is because the White House called and pressured them into going outside of sop because. Dan rather did a 2hr negative report on nasa and someone or Reagan and bush saw it and then they or they had someone call nasa and pressure management. The whole point of the Rogers commission was to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to the White House. So on live tv Rogers stops a guy from talking that was about to blow the whistle on the White House involvement. It almost came out. But Rogers knew exactly what his job was which was protect the politicians.once the engineers came forward. Rogers took a deep breath because now he has a believable story that doesn’t involve the truth. Yes it’s true nasa management ignored the engineers but that’s extremely deceitful. The reality is nasa management got treated exactly the same way as the engineers. Matter of fact nasa management turned around and did the same thing to the engineers as the White House did to them. You know bullies are not just bullies 99% of the time someone bullied them and taught them that behavior is acceptable and that’s why they do it. As in this case.
I live in Florida and remember that January as well. 2 scrubbed launches due to weather, and dammit get that rocket in the air. It was freezing that January morning....well below the temperature Morton thyocol said the O rings had potential failure....I believe they stated 50 degrees...and it was 32 degrees at the cape that morning? . 7 wonderful lives lost due to governmental ego bullsh!t.
There was no lack of communication. The rep for Morton Thiokol called a meeting with NASA the moment he heard the weather forecast for the night before launch. He specifically argued that they should not launch because Morton Thiokol had set temperature parameters outside of which NASA was Not allowed to launch. The management at NASA got his superiors on the phone and had a private conversation without the supervising engineer. The NASA management- fearful of losing their jobs DEMANDED proof that the o-rings would fail at that temperature. This was a specious demand... and diverged dramatically from launch authorization protocol. Morton Thiokol could not provide that proof other than in the form of a materials analysis. NASA demanded they fax over a launch authorization, and the jerk in charge at Thiokol, fearful for His job, went ahead and sent it. But the Thiokol engineer on site who tried to stop the launch refused to sign it. They launched anyway. Afterwards, the managers involved tried their best to cover up this meeting until the engineer who didn’t sign showed up at a meeting of the government investigative commission and told his story. In true corporate fashion, he was punished by Thiokol for doing the right thing. The o-ring failure didn’t bring down challenger. It was a failure of ordinary human self interest by managers who had become complacent with prior mission success.
@@ultimathule1000 He regretted not doing so for the rest of his life. The authorization was signed by the VP, the only person who could sign it, who was told by the CEO to put his management hat on. The implication was obvious, either sign or be sacked. The only way Allan could have raised the alarm would have been to go to NASA HQ in person. Likely he would have been refused admittance.
@@michaeledwards2251 : I don't think so. It could be a single phone call to NASA to force them to stop. It would be a huge mess next morning, but no launch. And the risk of being fired was also not so obvious, because how the company could dismiss an employee in such circumstances? There is always a game between comfort and bravery and the difference is very delicate. It's very easy to stay in comfort and also very easy to be brave. People in such situations immediately know that they made a horrible mistake. They regret not because of the mistake, but because they are aware how easy it could be avoided.
If Morton Thiokol hadn't approved the launch they would be admitting that their product did not meet the contractual specifications with respect to temperature, so the financial pressure against Morton Thiokol was enormous. The quote about "put your management hat on" is ridiculous, since management includes acknowledgement of failure.
@@captnnero The Morton Thiokol engineer on site did NOT approve the launch and refused to sign the paper specifically because the contractual specifications the O-rings had been approved for did NOT include a launch at below freezing temperatures. That is, Morton Thiokol had a perfectly sound and legal OUT for refusing to approve launch., and yet, they knuckled under to management pressure over launch cadence. Nothing in NASA’s design specifications required sub freezing launch capabilities. Morton Thiokol could not be sued for the failure of the o-rings since NASA decided to launch outside of their design envelope. They WERE sued for negligence for approving a launch outside the design specifications.
Allan tried to warn them not to launch, but they were told to prove it would fail by NASA. Totally different question than if it was safe. The Thiokol VP should have gone to jail for changing the recommendations and dominating the engineers into silence. This is a lesson not only for mechanical engineering, but social engineering and even theological studies. God gives us engineering tolerances/ moral laws, if you will, dare to exceed them in sin, and you risk fire/hell/ free fall as repercussions.
When was the material information about the polymer information known ? I remember there was difficulty finding any one willing to make the Shuttle Design. The designer expected a failure rate of 5%. The question arises, was the expected rate of polymer failure part of the expected Design failure rate ?
Has the exact Tg of the FKM particularly used on the challenger SRBs been determined. Ok I know that Tg is not a sharp temperature point and DSC vs DMA is different but what was the Tg at the Challenger seals?
1000 points of failure and they launched despite the real concern of failure on one of them, which nearly occurred before because of temperature and was described as resulting in catastrophic failure had it cascaded. Listen to your trench diggers, money movers.
It's easy to play Monday-morning quarterback after a failure like this. Managers many times are looking at the long term operational status of a program and engineers tend to focus on other issues. The question then becomes when should the concerns of engineers/technicians be of sufficient weight to properly influence go/no-go decisions. This is where in-depth vetting of managers, engineers and technical folks must be completed so that the right people are in the right positions. Once established, then the go/no-go decision process becomes a streamlined, collaborative effort with a much higher probability of the correct path being followed.
Hi Gino, great video. I'm not sure if you check CZcams messages so I'll try to find another way to reach you. I'm doing a story about the Challenger on my CZcams channel, and I'm wondering if I may please use your animation of the O-rings? I'd be happy to credit you on-screen and include a link in my description. Thank you! - Cindy
Nusse Fuffs I'm quite sure they were, something just went wrong with tolerances. Runner o-rings by my knowledge work by compressing them precisely in their grooves against the opposing face. A rubber ring would not be able to contain propellant exhaust by compressing against the pressurized gas like piston rings in combustion engines. It's there just to seal the gap between two cylindrical surfaces which have to have precise tolerances. These tolerances have at some point given up, leading to blow-by which led to eventual failure of the seal.
If you make it to seal under non firing conditions, when the motors fire, the heat and pressure would probably cause them to fail. You need to calculate them for normal operation parameters. You have to remember that these are not flat-4 engines, these things generate huge amounts of power, heat and pressure.
The great thing about NASA.. that we will never see again, due to political bullshit.. is their level of quality control is borderline neurotic. IM sure they tested, had results, made proposals for o-ring specifically made for freezing temperatures, maybe even built some.. But when it comes to launch centers located in tropical waters.. and optimum materiel for facilities long developed.. no one in their right mind would say, lets sacrifice this this and this, so we can have a gasket that is pliable in places like Alaska.. because no one would be dumb enough to launch a rocket with ice on it.. and surely a bunch of engineers would hollar if they tried. but they did... and the interuption in service started the long haul of losing our space program, until Obama came along and swung the Axe.. now the current administration is trying to sell our interests in the ISS.. using the excuse to "return to the moon" when we cant even get to our station on our own. Patton said he knew when the ability of Germany to control her own fate was lost.. he knew she was lost.. when he saw materiel being moved aroudn by wagon.. Yall have a nice day..
@Ken Hudson Ken he is wrong though. I am a theoretical physicist with a patent in my name and the link below is a more accurate explanation. Yes I was offered a job with NASA's NIAC :) czcams.com/video/s5nJG0om8KY/video.html
I've never seen an o-ring seal designed to be non-sealing (leaky) when nothing is flowing and to suddenly start sealing when something that shouldn't be leaking IS flowing. Are there many other examples of conventional o-ring seal configurations designed to be leaky until specific conditions of flow dynamics are encountered (pressure, flow rate, other parameters...). Or, is this a rather unconventional design. In the case of the shuttle Challenger design, what gases/fluids were meant to flow freely past the o-rings when they were in their non-sealing (leaky) configuration? And if there were no such gases or fluids meant to flow past the ring seals under certain conditions, what was/were the design objective(s) for a non-sealing (leaky) o-ring configuration? Are the blueprints or official documents showing the as-built o-ring seal connection available for inspection?
It was a coincidence that the propellant sealed the gap. It was designed so the o-rings would be the primary and only source to keep the gases contained. Perhaps some designs may require pressure to hold sealing surfaces against each other, but this is uncommon. Nothing was meant to flow freely past the o-ring seals in the space shuttle SRBs. The Parker-Hannfin O-Ring handbook is the industry standard for o-ring design. www.parker.com/Literature/O-Ring%20Division%20Literature/ORD%205700.pdf
@@GH-oi2jf So, MTI didn't get a call from NASA asking them to design an o-ring, giving them design paramaters 'n such? Someone from NASA just went down to Ace and asked the helpful hardware man which aisle the o-rings were on? That's how it went down?
@@karenhilker8074 Everyone knew the design was poor. The field joint was redesigned and the construction contract awarded to a CA aerospace company at the time of the Challenger accident. However Thiokol said the new segments wouldn’t be constructed and delivered for another year.
I don't understand why there was a gap at all that required an O ring seal. Why didn't they just have a closed, welded and unbroken cylinder for the SRB?
Neither Malloy nor Ebeling were among those pushing for the launch. They argued against it. It was higher ups at NASA and the Thiokol bosses who pushed the launch. However, Mulloy was one of those impatient to get it up eventually.
Malloy was always pushing to launch! It looked bad on him for some reason to get behind schedule. Every time an engineer said anything against launch during the conference call, Malloy wld come up with something in contest with it. He once argued that the O rings came back damaged in hot weather as well so..?? Top engineer gave in, faxed letter saying it was ok and Malloy ran with it. That sob gambled with lives just to appease the public scrutiny and his ego and lost alot of damn good people as a result. Semper Fidelis
No one went to jail for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Therefore, history would repeat itself on February 1, 2003 with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. There was no accountability. Someone should of went to jail in 1986 which could have led to an investigation of the foam striking the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 when it was climbing into space. What a shame. Both disasters could of been prevented and all those astronauts did not have to die in vain.
They all wanted clean hands on this. So there was a manager from NASA who still says that the o-ring was not to blame, and so was he not. But he forgets one thing: the space craft blew up, didn't it?
Eagerness to perform has sunk ships, crashed aircraft, dirigibles, you name it. Good solid reliable science and engineering practices always get tossed aside to favor some political or corporate agenda. Same sort of thing goes on with nuclear power pant design, operation, and maintenance. Humans are not mature enough as a species yet to be able to handle these situations like adults.
Quando há erros pode ser fatal para todos que estão dentro,por que uma professora arriscou sua vida? Todos sabem o risco que existe, as crianças perderam a mãe, para que isso?? Provar o que ao mundo???😢
There was no lack of understanding or lack of communication they knew fully well that the o rings had been reviewed and were not able to perform at that temperature and they went ahead anyway. There are documentation and voice transcripts which testify to this so this person is not only misinformed but part of a greater damage limitation excorsise🤔
For the real answer without all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit, watch prof. Feinman's demonstration at the commission's board of inquiry into the "accident".
Matt D - Yeah, that materials management guy did what NASA did in the press conferences. He explains the O-rings function with a lot of overly complicated and unnecessary scientific technical jargon. Fact was, like Feynman simply demonstrated, you put the O-ring rubber in ice water, it losses all its elasticity and doesn’t seal...
...'they didn't really appreciate....?' A multi-billion dollar, 400,0000 employee Administration didn't appreciate.........? Astronauts died because they didn't appreciate. Jeff Hoffman is being careful here but it's clear; a dreadful mistake was made to launch the Challenger...ignorance of O ring material spec was no excuse. RIP, the Challenger heroes.
Its easy for Micahel Rubner to act like he knew what was going to happen AFTER the fact and AFTER they figured it out. I could go on record AFTER the Tyson/Douglas fight and say "Well, judging by blah blah blah, it's obvious Tyson was going to lose".
I stopped watching at the moment that the narrator said that America's space program suffered its first fatalities in flight. WTF? I remember Apollo 1 very clearly. It doesn't matter if they were "in flight" or preparing for flight. This video is asinine. Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom Edward H. White II Roger B. Chaffee en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Well, to be completely accurate, they never made it off the ground. Perhaps it is mischaracterization to what he said (he’s not a narrator, by the way), but is a true statement. As far as not watching any further, I think that’s kinda’ harsh.
William Bruce Wilhite Then why did you leave out the memory of Gemini 9 Astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett? They were flying from Houston to St. Louis for simulator training at McDonnell Aircraft and crashed while landing in bad weather. (Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, their backup crew, were flying right behind them, lost sight of them in the clouds while landing, and did a go around). In fact, during the crash they hit the McDonnell Aircraft building and cartwheeled through the parking lot. They found See in the parking lot strapped in his seat. Later they found Bassett's decapitated head in the rafters of the building. Parts of the plane nearly hit the Gemini 9 capsule they were to fly into space as it was being built there. Parts did hit the Gemini 10 capsule as they were finishing building it. WTF? You forgot them? Your comment is what's asinine! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_NASA_T-38_crash
It’s easy for me to say that this was a terrible design, after the fact. But it’s far easier for me to say this was a TERRIBLE DESIGN before the fact! It was clearly flawed!!! O-rings that only seal once pressure is applied???? And no other redundancies other than two sets of o-rings that work exactly the same way?????? How could you be so careless as an engineer?????? It blows my mind!!!
Why is this Mr. Rubner blaming the engineers, when many of those engineers suffered PTSD from their screaming about the issue being ignored by management. Either Rubner is clueless or corrupt.
This is one of the best explanations of why the O-rings on the SRB failed that morning, which led to the Challenger disaster.
The engineers did know. They raised concerns 12 hours before they took off. Thiokol Morton management ignored their own engineers and bowed to the intimidating pressure put on them by nasa.
The engineer's knew and ruled against launch that day.
All these comments are very correct.The engineers tried everything to stop the launch.Its sad that two of them passed away.Roger B. Being the most knowledgeable of the engineers.He reacted with his experience and his huge heart.He truly cared about the Challenger crew.He knew the outcome.
The engineers knew and told the management to postpone the launch, thats what happen when the management thinks they know better than the engineers.
And mop Malloy never went behind the bars ( jail )
If you're truly interested in this subject read Dr Diane Vaughan's book "The Challenger Launch Decision." Reading that book even changed the way Wayne Hale (STS flight director extraordinaire) looked at the accident and the personnel involved.
Sad but true
Read up, everyone was GO for launch, there are even audiotapes.
Exactly right
If I remember correctly from my engineering ethics class. They had partial failures of these o-rings in the past. So even under ideal conditions they would be partially burned through after launch.
Yes that’s true.. they knew about this problem two years before the 86 explosion.
Yes they showed soot around them a lot BUT, there is something that you do not know or realize. Warmth and cold. In freezing cold weather it hardens, and in warmth they are flexable.
That area when the blasted NASA Manager shot down was in the shade and the main box frozen in ice, with ice cycles. It was in a minus degree area, not in the thawing degrees of heat that it needs to do its job.
When my father, mother and I watched as part of his creation went up, the shock of it exploding shook dad to his core. I held him as he cried, I asked him to explain to me what happened. He had recorded the shot so we looked at it again. He asked me if I saw the flare on the right side just a split second before the explosion, I told him yes because I'd seen that just when the shuttle was going for throttle up. He told me that that was where he designed the o rings to be and where they were placed.
While in the Air Force he was loaned out to NASA for two years and built Woomera Station in Australia. He was a brilliant man. He was asked to do some designing on the Shuttle, that was where he did the o rings.
In the frozen state that they were in, in the area of the 2 fuels they did not have a firm seal to keep the ice and the burning outer tanks from mixing. The throttle up brought up the secondary fuel up to burn from the shuttle. The o ring was not flexable and did NOT have that critical area sealed off. Water and fuel don't mix, they explode. Thus the shuttle exploded.
He wanted to kill the manager for his outright neglance and money grubbingness. That manager was a MURDERER.
If the shuttle had been allowed to thaw Challenger would not have exploded because the fast thawing ice would NOT have gotten into the fuel mixture.
This is the area that had to be re-designed, so it would not happen again if that area was iced over in future flights.
Take an o ring and put it in the freezer overnight. Take it out and in one hand squeeze it and in your other hand take an o ring not frozen and squeeze at the same time as you squeeze the frozen. A tiny test but you will see what I mean.
My father was a devestated man. He was so tense when the next shot was finally made, but he could not forgive the man who caused the accident just so that money would not be lost in government contracts.
I thank God that he retired early after getting a 15 million dollars law suit against him by one of the victims family. He was NOT an asset to NASA but a tragedy.
Yes. However those previous burn-throughs had never fully compromised the second o-ring. It was there specifically as a redundancy because it was impossible to guarantee that the first o-ring would provide sealing at ANY TEMPERATURE. In previous flights, there had been varying levels of thermal effects. In some cases, it was simply some minor scorching to the primary o-ring that did not effect the secondary at all. This was expected, as the o-rings were designed to interact with the combustion gasses. As stated, they would only seal if combustion gasses exerted pressure on them. In other launches, however, it was noticed that the primary o-ring had been compromised and that thermal effects had reached the secondary o-ring. Not good, but that’s what the secondary was there for. it was noted by the engineers at Morton-Thiokol (manufacturers of the SRBs) that the depth of combustion gas penetration correlated to lower launch temps: I.e if they launched at high temps, thermal effects were constrained to the primary o-ring. At lower temps, the primary o-ring was compromised and thermal effects reached the secondary. As the head engineer of the SRB program said “We knew there was a cliff, but we didn’t know exactly where it was” and recommended not launching at anything less than 53 degrees F.
However, because previous o-ring failures had NOT resulted in any disasters prior, a psychological phenomenon called “normalization of deviance” set in. This is the idea that the more often you encounter an anomaly that doesn’t result in poor outcomes, the more you accept the anomaly as normal and acceptable, even when the anomaly is not expected or within design parameters. It’s a moving of the mental goal posts as to what is acceptable. That’s what happened with temperatures and o-ring failures. The o-rings were failing, but never catastrophically so. Decreasing temps increased failure, but never to the point of disaster, so the bottom limit of acceptable launch temperatures kept dropping. “Oh, well the launch succeeded at X degrees, so it’s fine to launch at X-1.” Then when X-1 succeeds, they go to X-2. And this system continues to work…right up until it doesn’t. This is the exact same phenomenon that led to Columbia’s destruction. Just replace “launch temp and o-rings” with “foam shedding”.
I do take exception with the one presenter characterizing the disaster as resulting from poor communication. It wasnt poor communication. Morton-Thiokol said in no uncertain terms that the Challenger shouldn’t launch. They didn’t miscommunicate: they were knowingly ignored.
SIDE NOTE: What often isn’t mentioned in Challenger analyses, but brought up by the head of engineering for the SRBs was that there was a chance the Challenger actually COULD have survived despite the failure of the O-rings.
When the burn through first occurred right at engines start (when the first puffs of black smoke are visible), the combustion products burned through the O-rings and contacted the extremely cold steel SRB casing. This caused the products to flash-freeze in the gap and form an “in-situ ceramic seal” that plugged the hole. It’s the reason you see the puffs of smoke at launch, but it takes nearly a minute for the burn through plume to appear. In that intervening time, the frozen product seal did the job of the destroyed o-rings. However, this launch was the first time the jet stream was over the cape, and thus the shuttle encountered higher than average wind sheer events during ascent, one of which was strong enough to shatter the ceramic seal and restart the gas leakage. While not guaranteed, had the jet stream not been over the cape, it’s possible that fortuitous ceramic seal might have held long enough for the SRBs to complete their burn, and thus Challenger would have survived.
Not only that. They knew about the problem many years before the first launch - since 1977.
@@nogi2167 I really wonder if NASA would have taken the burn though seriously if the ceramic seal held. Knowing them, they would've just called it a "feature."
Moreover, the launch was on a far colder day than the previous failures. And the meeting the night before had FINALLY certified a minimum acceptable temperature 54 Fahrenheit vs the late teens/early 20s of that morning, that as history shows fell on deaf ears.
I lived in Plant City, FL when the Challenger exploded. Plant City is close enough to the Kennedy Space Center that we could see the shuttles go up. I was in... third or fourth grade. Every shuttle launch we would go outside and watch. I saw it explode. I remember not understanding what happened -- I just knew my teacher was freaking out. We went back inside where it was explained.
Also, my Mom was one of the finalists to be onboard -- she was a teacher, and they had that "teacher in space" program.
My father when the design work was being done for the shuttle, before it was ever built, was on loan from the Air Force to NASA. He built Woomera in Australia and he designed part of the shuttle. His part was in the area of the detonation when Challenger exploded. The o rings, all of the designers knew that they were important, and, they worked for so many years and flights without a problem, until that day. My father was in shock for days.
These managers KNEW what ICE DOES to that area of the shuttle, but THEY WERE TOO GOD DAMNED ANXIOUS to get the shuttle OFF THE GROUND with the teacher inside instead of scrubbing the mission to another but warmer day that they SENT THE SHUTTLE UP WITH ICE ON HER. It was too God Damn COLD for a mission AND TOO DANGEROUS. I put the blame solely on the managers for that needless accident.
If it had not been so cold and iced up that accident would NEVER have happened.
THAT MISSION SHOULD HAVE BEEN SCRUBBED.
May those managers BURN IN HELL for what they did.
I love the little blue glow where the bell cooling fuel ignites off to the side.. how that pressure difference pulls it around.that escaping atmosphere
January 28th was the coldest day of the year (23F) at the launch site Kennedy Space Center, which is East of Orlando. The normal low on that day was 51F. It doesn't freeze much in Central Florida. the people who made the decision to launch didn't know what they were talking about. and they ignored the engineers who did. and the haste to launch was of course all about money.
No that’s the BUlss shii version. The reality is that no one talks about is the white house called nasa management and browbeat them about embarrassing them on such a high profile mission and nasa management felt they had no choice. Of course the politicians needed a scape goat so they made management that scape goat. The engineers themselves said this was the first time management went against a recommendation so they didn’t know how to handle it. The reason why is because the White House called and pressured them into going outside of sop because. Dan rather did a 2hr negative report on nasa and someone or Reagan and bush saw it and then they or they had someone call nasa and pressure management. The whole point of the Rogers commission was to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to the White House. So on live tv Rogers stops a guy from talking that was about to blow the whistle on the White House involvement. It almost came out. But Rogers knew exactly what his job was which was protect the politicians.once the engineers came forward. Rogers took a deep breath because now he has a believable story that doesn’t involve the truth. Yes it’s true nasa management ignored the engineers but that’s extremely deceitful. The reality is nasa management got treated exactly the same way as the engineers. Matter of fact nasa management turned around and did the same thing to the engineers as the White House did to them. You know bullies are not just bullies 99% of the time someone bullied them and taught them that behavior is acceptable and that’s why they do it. As in this case.
they had to get the teacher up, simple as that
I live in Florida and remember that January as well. 2 scrubbed launches due to weather, and dammit get that rocket in the air. It was freezing that January morning....well below the temperature Morton thyocol said the O rings had potential failure....I believe they stated 50 degrees...and it was 32 degrees at the cape that morning? . 7 wonderful lives lost due to governmental ego bullsh!t.
I was alive and saw it on tv when I was young. Was so sad.
There was no lack of communication. The rep for Morton Thiokol called a meeting with NASA the moment he heard the weather forecast for the night before launch.
He specifically argued that they should not launch because Morton Thiokol had set temperature parameters outside of which NASA was Not allowed to launch.
The management at NASA got his superiors on the phone and had a private conversation without the supervising engineer. The NASA management- fearful of losing their jobs DEMANDED proof that the o-rings would fail at that temperature. This was a specious demand... and diverged dramatically from launch authorization protocol. Morton Thiokol could not provide that proof other than in the form of a materials analysis. NASA demanded they fax over a launch authorization, and the jerk in charge at Thiokol, fearful for His job, went ahead and sent it. But the Thiokol engineer on site who tried to stop the launch refused to sign it. They launched anyway.
Afterwards, the managers involved tried their best to cover up this meeting until the engineer who didn’t sign showed up at a meeting of the government investigative commission and told his story. In true corporate fashion, he was punished by Thiokol for doing the right thing.
The o-ring failure didn’t bring down challenger. It was a failure of ordinary human self interest by managers who had become complacent with prior mission success.
I wonder why Allan didn't raised the alarm to media or to the supervisory board of NASA. This is something that Allan never explained.
@@ultimathule1000
He regretted not doing so for the rest of his life. The authorization was signed by the VP, the only person who could sign it, who was told by the CEO to put his management hat on. The implication was obvious, either sign or be sacked.
The only way Allan could have raised the alarm would have been to go to NASA HQ in person. Likely he would have been refused admittance.
@@michaeledwards2251 : I don't think so. It could be a single phone call to NASA to force them to stop. It would be a huge mess next morning, but no launch. And the risk of being fired was also not so obvious, because how the company could dismiss an employee in such circumstances? There is always a game between comfort and bravery and the difference is very delicate. It's very easy to stay in comfort and also very easy to be brave. People in such situations immediately know that they made a horrible mistake. They regret not because of the mistake, but because they are aware how easy it could be avoided.
If Morton Thiokol hadn't approved the launch they would be admitting that their product did not meet the contractual specifications with respect to temperature, so the financial pressure against Morton Thiokol was enormous. The quote about "put your management hat on" is ridiculous, since management includes acknowledgement of failure.
@@captnnero The Morton Thiokol engineer on site did NOT approve the launch and refused to sign the paper specifically because the contractual specifications the O-rings had been approved for did NOT include a launch at below freezing temperatures. That is, Morton Thiokol had a perfectly sound and legal OUT for refusing to approve launch., and yet, they knuckled under to management pressure over launch cadence. Nothing in NASA’s design specifications required sub freezing launch capabilities. Morton Thiokol could not be sued for the failure of the o-rings since NASA decided to launch outside of their design envelope. They WERE sued for negligence for approving a launch outside the design specifications.
Allan tried to warn them not to launch, but they were told to prove it would fail by NASA. Totally different question than if it was safe. The Thiokol VP should have gone to jail for changing the recommendations and dominating the engineers into silence. This is a lesson not only for mechanical engineering, but social engineering and even theological studies. God gives us engineering tolerances/ moral laws, if you will, dare to exceed them in sin, and you risk fire/hell/ free fall as repercussions.
This video was created for MIT students in a solid state chemistry course.
That's excellent
When was the material information about the polymer information known ? I remember there was difficulty finding any one willing to make the Shuttle Design. The designer expected a failure rate of 5%. The question arises, was the expected rate of polymer failure part of the expected Design failure rate ?
This video is great Thank you
It was not lack of communication, the big shots were told about the o ring issue and advised not to launch.
Has the exact Tg of the FKM particularly used on the challenger SRBs been determined. Ok I know that Tg is not a sharp temperature point and DSC vs DMA is different but what was the Tg at the Challenger seals?
1000 points of failure and they launched despite the real concern of failure on one of them, which nearly occurred before because of temperature and was described as resulting in catastrophic failure had it cascaded. Listen to your trench diggers, money movers.
It's easy to play Monday-morning quarterback after a failure like this. Managers many times are looking at the long term operational status of a program and engineers tend to focus on other issues. The question then becomes when should the concerns of engineers/technicians be of sufficient weight to properly influence go/no-go decisions. This is where in-depth vetting of managers, engineers and technical folks must be completed so that the right people are in the right positions. Once established, then the go/no-go decision process becomes a streamlined, collaborative effort with a much higher probability of the correct path being followed.
It was on a Tuesday. Not a Monday.
I wish I could have a mentor as this Professor.
Then your brain dead 🤔🧠👀😈
Hi Gino, great video. I'm not sure if you check CZcams messages so I'll try to find another way to reach you. I'm doing a story about the Challenger on my CZcams channel, and I'm wondering if I may please use your animation of the O-rings? I'd be happy to credit you on-screen and include a link in my description. Thank you! - Cindy
As many times as they had the problem, why didn’t they change it along time ago?
But why was the o-rings not made to seal all the time, from the moment of assembly instead of when heated up? I dont get that.
Nusse Fuffs I'm quite sure they were, something just went wrong with tolerances. Runner o-rings by my knowledge work by compressing them precisely in their grooves against the opposing face. A rubber ring would not be able to contain propellant exhaust by compressing against the pressurized gas like piston rings in combustion engines. It's there just to seal the gap between two cylindrical surfaces which have to have precise tolerances. These tolerances have at some point given up, leading to blow-by which led to eventual failure of the seal.
If you make it to seal under non firing conditions, when the motors fire, the heat and pressure would probably cause them to fail. You need to calculate them for normal operation parameters. You have to remember that these are not flat-4 engines, these things generate huge amounts of power, heat and pressure.
The great thing about NASA.. that we will never see again, due to political bullshit.. is their level of quality control is borderline neurotic. IM sure they tested, had results, made proposals for o-ring specifically made for freezing temperatures, maybe even built some.. But when it comes to launch centers located in tropical waters.. and optimum materiel for facilities long developed.. no one in their right mind would say, lets sacrifice this this and this, so we can have a gasket that is pliable in places like Alaska.. because no one would be dumb enough to launch a rocket with ice on it.. and surely a bunch of engineers would hollar if they tried.
but they did... and the interuption in service started the long haul of losing our space program, until Obama came along and swung the Axe.. now the current administration is trying to sell our interests in the ISS.. using the excuse to "return to the moon" when we cant even get to our station on our own.
Patton said he knew when the ability of Germany to control her own fate was lost.. he knew she was lost.. when he saw materiel being moved aroudn by wagon..
Yall have a nice day..
@Ken Hudson Ken he is wrong though. I am a theoretical physicist with a patent in my name and the link below is a more accurate explanation. Yes I was offered a job with NASA's NIAC :)
czcams.com/video/s5nJG0om8KY/video.html
O rings are trash.
I've never seen an o-ring seal designed to be non-sealing (leaky) when nothing is flowing and to suddenly start sealing when something that shouldn't be leaking IS flowing. Are there many other examples of conventional o-ring seal configurations designed to be leaky until specific conditions of flow dynamics are encountered (pressure, flow rate, other parameters...). Or, is this a rather unconventional design.
In the case of the shuttle Challenger design, what gases/fluids were meant to flow freely past the o-rings when they were in their non-sealing (leaky) configuration? And if there were no such gases or fluids meant to flow past the ring seals under certain conditions, what was/were the design objective(s) for a non-sealing (leaky) o-ring configuration?
Are the blueprints or official documents showing the as-built o-ring seal connection available for inspection?
I also found that curious??
It was a coincidence that the propellant sealed the gap. It was designed so the o-rings would be the primary and only source to keep the gases contained. Perhaps some designs may require pressure to hold sealing surfaces against each other, but this is uncommon.
Nothing was meant to flow freely past the o-ring seals in the space shuttle SRBs.
The Parker-Hannfin O-Ring handbook is the industry standard for o-ring design.
www.parker.com/Literature/O-Ring%20Division%20Literature/ORD%205700.pdf
Archie Ball - It was unconventional. The manufacturer of the o-rings said that they were not intended for such an application.
@@GH-oi2jf So, MTI didn't get a call from NASA asking them to design an o-ring, giving them design paramaters 'n such? Someone from NASA just went down to Ace and asked the helpful hardware man which aisle the o-rings were on? That's how it went down?
Not an O-ring but the sr71 blackbird would leaked small amounts of fuel by design until the plane was heated up and the tanks expanded enough to seal.
Unfortunately it happened again with Columbia, the same type of thinking, it will be ok it was just a piece of foam right!
Why didn't they made the rubber rings larger so that they permanently seal off the gap?
The area where the O ring sits would have to be redesigned
@@karenhilker8074 Everyone knew the design was poor. The field joint was redesigned and the construction contract awarded to a CA aerospace company at the time of the Challenger accident. However Thiokol said the new segments wouldn’t be constructed and delivered for another year.
It wasn’t the space program’s first fatality. Why did you ignore Apollo 1?
BlueBraviary - He said the first “in flight.”
I don't understand why there was a gap at all that required an O ring seal. Why didn't they just have a closed, welded and unbroken cylinder for the SRB?
They were designed to be reusable and transport back and forth from Utah to FL was by rail. The segments had to fit on rail cars
Yeah just remember these things always get built by the lowest bidders too. U get what you pay for.
@@kristinaanderson4160 Couldn't they have made something like screw together segments then? Seems like a strange design to me.
Did Lawrence Mulloy go to jail?
Neither Malloy nor Ebeling were among those pushing for the launch. They argued against it. It was higher ups at NASA and the Thiokol bosses who pushed the launch. However, Mulloy was one of those impatient to get it up eventually.
Malloy was always pushing to launch! It looked bad on him for some reason to get behind schedule. Every time an engineer said anything against launch during the conference call, Malloy wld come up with something in contest with it. He once argued that the O rings came back damaged in hot weather as well so..?? Top engineer gave in, faxed letter saying it was ok and Malloy ran with it. That sob gambled with lives just to appease the public scrutiny and his ego and lost alot of damn good people as a result.
Semper Fidelis
No one went to jail for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Therefore, history would repeat itself on February 1, 2003 with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. There was no accountability. Someone should of went to jail in 1986 which could have led to an investigation of the foam striking the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 when it was climbing into space. What a shame. Both disasters could of been prevented and all those astronauts did not have to die in vain.
They all wanted clean hands on this. So there was a manager from NASA who still says that the o-ring was not to blame, and so was he not. But he forgets one thing: the space craft blew up, didn't it?
Art Rose aww
Any good car mechanic can tell you how o rings and gaskets fail in cold weather
It was just a lack of communication, because if they would’ve told them they would’ve known
Interesting
Indeed it is
the engineers warned management about the dangers launching in cold tempts but management didn't wait to hear it,.
If I weren't a certified genius...I would be very confused by now.
Anyone who has delt with cold polymer knows this would be an issue.
He sounds like Jeff Daniels!
Second guy is a genius.
He is an ignorant clown that blamed the engineers,
in reality the engineers tried to move heaven and earth to stop the flight.
Phase transitions with Josh Brolin.
Eagerness to perform has sunk ships, crashed aircraft, dirigibles, you name it. Good solid reliable science and engineering practices always get tossed aside to favor some
political or corporate agenda. Same sort of thing goes on with nuclear power pant design, operation, and maintenance. Humans are not mature enough as a species yet to
be able to handle these situations like adults.
well ns everyone knewn what happened cold tempt made the o-rings not to expand nasa didn't wait to hear it
Quando há erros pode ser fatal para todos que estão dentro,por que uma professora arriscou sua vida? Todos sabem o risco que existe, as crianças perderam a mãe, para que isso?? Provar o que ao mundo???😢
There was no lack of understanding or lack of communication they knew fully well that the o rings had been reviewed and were not able to perform at that temperature and they went ahead anyway. There are documentation and voice transcripts which testify to this so this person is not only misinformed but part of a greater damage limitation excorsise🤔
They would’ve changed design the second time they had the problem we would’ve lost our Friends and family
Sounds like my menstrual cycle i blow up every month!
still don't know why they didn't use tube rocket boosters
I had a O ring fail once, I Named him Zaccary 😋
For the real answer without all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit, watch prof. Feinman's demonstration at the commission's board of inquiry into the "accident".
Matt D - Yeah, that materials management guy did what NASA did in the press conferences. He explains the O-rings function with a lot of overly complicated and unnecessary scientific technical jargon. Fact was, like Feynman simply demonstrated, you put the O-ring rubber in ice water, it losses all its elasticity and doesn’t seal...
...'they didn't really appreciate....?' A multi-billion dollar, 400,0000 employee Administration didn't appreciate.........? Astronauts died because they didn't appreciate. Jeff Hoffman is being careful here but it's clear; a dreadful mistake was made to launch the Challenger...ignorance of O ring material spec was no excuse. RIP, the Challenger heroes.
Its easy for Micahel Rubner to act like he knew what was going to happen AFTER the fact and AFTER they figured it out. I could go on record AFTER the Tyson/Douglas fight and say "Well, judging by blah blah blah, it's obvious Tyson was going to lose".
criminal.
Feynman. sorry
Lol MIT professors just scribble on a chalkboard.
I don't understatement.
I stopped watching at the moment that the narrator said that America's space program suffered its first fatalities in flight. WTF? I remember Apollo 1 very clearly. It doesn't matter if they were "in flight" or preparing for flight. This video is asinine.
Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom
Edward H. White II
Roger B. Chaffee
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Well, to be completely accurate, they never made it off the ground. Perhaps it is mischaracterization to what he said (he’s not a narrator, by the way), but is a true statement. As far as not watching any further, I think that’s kinda’ harsh.
William Bruce Wilhite
Then why did you leave out the memory of Gemini 9 Astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett? They were flying from Houston to St. Louis for simulator training at McDonnell Aircraft and crashed while landing in bad weather. (Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, their backup crew, were flying right behind them, lost sight of them in the clouds while landing, and did a go around). In fact, during the crash they hit the McDonnell Aircraft building and cartwheeled through the parking lot. They found See in the parking lot strapped in his seat. Later they found Bassett's decapitated head in the rafters of the building. Parts of the plane nearly hit the Gemini 9 capsule they were to fly into space as it was being built there. Parts did hit the Gemini 10 capsule as they were finishing building it. WTF? You forgot them? Your comment is what's asinine!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_NASA_T-38_crash
the first guy is wrong. Very scary to see and hear.
Peter Kay - Do you mean Prof. Hoffman? If you can’t say about what and why, you have nothing.
It’s easy for me to say that this was a terrible design, after the fact.
But it’s far easier for me to say this was a TERRIBLE DESIGN before the fact!
It was clearly flawed!!! O-rings that only seal once pressure is applied???? And no other redundancies other than two sets of o-rings that work exactly the same way?????? How could you be so careless as an engineer?????? It blows my mind!!!
Why is this Mr. Rubner blaming the engineers,
when many of those engineers suffered PTSD from their screaming about the issue being ignored by management.
Either Rubner is clueless or corrupt.