Roger Boisjoly
Roger Boisjoly, 73, Dies; Warned of Shuttle Danger, NY Times
“Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail. “The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” he wrote. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launching, killing its seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, N.H.”
Remembering Roger Boisjoly: He Tried To Stop Shuttle Challenger Launch
“I’m very angry that nobody listened,” Boisjoly told me. And he asked himself, he said, if he could have done anything different. But then a flash of certainty returned. “We were talking to the right people,” he said. “We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch.”
Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challenger launch, LA Times
“When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger. By that time, Boisjoly believed that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished.”
RIP.
A very telling story about the attitude of NASA management then AND NOW; NASA has never recovered and the attitude of its management has never changed. It has only gotten worse as incompetent psycophants are promoted into leadership. Go along to get along, disregard safety, human life and threats to the program, or face ostracism.
Amen!
RIP.
Keith Cowing
Board of Directors member
Challenger Center for Space Science Education
2007-2011
Imagine how different things might be today if we had listened to him. The field joints were a known issue long before Challenger, and safer SRBs had been proposed. In fact better SRBs would be proposed, and cancelled (typically by Congress for cost reasons–Congress never gets sufficient blame for NASA’s problems) several times during the Shuttle’s operational life.
Roger Boisjoly is an unsung hero. He tried to save lives and nobody would listen to him. Afterwards, instead of being lauded and promoted he was shunned and forced out.
Along the same note; I wonder what happened to the four Thiokol Vice Presidents and General Manager Jerry Mason?
He was quoted as saying that after the disaster the only industry person he felt understood what he went through was Sally
Ride, who hugged him after his appearance
before the investigation commission. “She was the only one,” he told a Newsday reporter in 1988. “The only one.” I hope he knew later how much so many of us looked up to him for his ethical stand after the accident. He inspired many of us to fight the system for better safety, no matter the consequence.
I have long admired him and quoted him many times. I hope he can have peace now and his wife Roberta and daughters and grandchildren and brothers will always be as proud of him as many of us who tried to follow in his footsteps.
God speed Roger.
There is a bias in aerospace for not being a “steely eyed missileman”. I think it originally came from Cold War attitudes of the 50’s-60’s.
This made it too hard to communicate about mis-design … because of the unspoken “monkey wrenching” of the agenda/schedule implied.
Roger wasn’t unique in noticing something wrong. But some wanted to see him as having a panicked conscious – as if in someway this took away from the program. Roger was unique in being able to attempt to take it to “full stop” level … and he paid a price … because of the unforgivable in being right. As long as we can’t really address this fairly, we’ll always be going backwards, even while we attempt forward movement.
As evidence to this effect, some of his objections … are still being ignored. In his memory, I can think of no better monument than to genuinely, seriously address his concerns. Roger won’t be able to know … but at least his efforts will be given the respect they originally deserved.
Also, having a prize in his name for attempting to communicate necessary controversial opinion … might continually remind certain people of the danger of “taking off their engineering hat’s and putting on their management hat’s”.
RIP. You did good. And thanks for your work on the LM.
Roger Boisjoly is the kind of people we desperately need in NASA. I will never forget reading a memo he wrote that was in the Roger’s Commission Report on Challenger where he said (and I paraphrase here), I do not want to have to go in front of a congressional committee and explain why we continue to launch when we know we have this problem with the O-rings. I believe it was the same memo quoted in the NY Times article where he warned of a catatrophe of the highest order. He put it all on the line to try and protect the lives of our astronauts and he was vilified for it when he turned out to be correct. If I’m not mistaken, he was the only one who lost his job. Such is the fate of whistleblowers who work for NASA or it’s contractors. We just lost a great man.
No organization should have performance appraisal and promotions based on a completely incestuous system. The Authority/Responsibility ratio gets too far above 1 when the responsibility of higher ranks diminishes much faster than authority increases.