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I'd recommend that anyone who is interested in the nitty gritty details of the Challenger disaster, and anyone who is in an engineering position and signs off o

I'd recommend that anyone who is interested in the nitty gritty details of the Challenger disaster, and anyone who is in an engineering position and signs off of safety approvals, to read "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" by Allan McDonald. He was the Thiokol program manager who refused to sign the Thiokol safe-to-fly memo but was overruled by executives. The STS-4 erosion is discussed, as is erosion in the Minuteman missile system which has a similar joint design as the Shuttle SRB. The book is very technically detailed, probably too detailed for the non-engineering general public to appreciate. But any reader will be appalled by the corporate and government malfeasance that lead the the disaster, and the attempts that were made to cover it up. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5070507-truth-lies-and-o-rings https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5070507-truth-lies-an...

jordanb 2y ago
I feel like a major thing that isn't really discussed is just the way the safety culture evolved (or failed to evolve) at NASA at the beginning of the shuttle program. The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program was a crash program essentially developed with a wartime urgency (run by people who had experience with wartime development efforts). The astronauts were mostly people with military aviation and test-pilot backgrounds at a time when that was a very risky profession. There's been a lot of talk about quality fade and normalization of deviance and while that's very useful I think if you look at the history of the earlier programs, it should be clear that NASA wasn't an organization that started with high safety standards and allowed them to degrade, rather it was an organization built on a "kick the tires and light the fires" culture focused on the moonshot, who then failed to transition into an organization that could build and operate a "space airliner."

jordanb 2y ago

I feel like a major thing that isn't really discussed is just the way the safety culture evolved (or failed to evolve) at NASA at the beginning of the shuttle program. The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program was a crash program essentially developed with a wartime urgency (run by people who had experience with wartime development efforts). The astronauts were mostly people with military aviation and test-pilot backgrounds at a time when that was a very risky profession. There's been a lot of talk about quality fade and normalization of deviance and while that's very useful I think if you look at the history of the earlier programs, it should be clear that NASA wasn't an organization that started with high safety standards and allowed them to degrade, rather it was an organization built on a "kick the tires and light the fires" culture focused on the moonshot, who then failed to transition into an organization that could build and operate a "space airliner."