Santa Cruz Sentinel from Santa Cruz, California • Page 35

Classified ads. 3-22 Sunday, Jan. 25, 1987 Santa Cruz Sentinel The Challenger Remembered Explosion's reverberations still being felt Thiokol bosses overruled their engineers and gave NASA the go-ahead. The Rogers Commission said Thiokol acted under pressure from NASA. The men who made the final decision to launch say they knew none of this; not about the suspect 0-rings, not about the history of leaks and not about the launch-eve argument.

John Young, chief of the astronaut office and NASA's most experienced astronaut with six flights, referred to the O-rings as "the secret seal, which no one that we know knew about." But the Rogers Commission disputed that. The O-ring history, presented to the top level at NASA headquarters in August 1985, "was sufficiently detailed to require corrective action prior to the next flight," the commission said. And astronaut Robert Crippen, under questioning by the panel, admitted he had been a representative of the astronauts at one meeting where the problem was discussed without grasping its significance. The Rogers Commission concluded that: "The space shuttle's solid rocket booster problem began with the faulty design of its joint and increased as both NASA and contractor management first failed to recognize it as a problem, then failed to fix it and finally treated it as an acceptable flight risk." The commission also determined that NASA was under too great pressure to launch and was stretching its capabilities to the limit in scheduling 15 flights for 1986. But it found no substance to the rumor that the White House had pushed for the Jan.

28 launch so that the shuttle could be in orbit when President Reagan delivered his State of the Union speech. While the space agency scrambled to satisfy nine major recommendations made by the commission, shuttle operations were stopped not to resume until after a hiatus of at least two years. Not in the for-seeable future would the flight rate again envision two dozen flights a year; the first post-Challenger flight is scheduled for Feb 18, 1988, with four to follow later in the year. By HARRY F. ROSENTHAL The Associated Press CHRISTA McAuliffe came to Cape Canaveral full of excitement for the adventure she called "the ultimate field trip." No teacher, she said, had ever been more prepared for just two lessons.

"I just hope everyone tunes in on Day 4 to watch the teacher teaching from space," she said. On Day 4, with the nation in mourning, Navy men were skimming the remains of space shuttle Challenger from the Atlantic Ocean and came across a few pages of the lessons the teacher never got to teach. And, a second-grade pupil in Chevy Chase, brought to school an explanation of the accident that said: "The space shuttle exploded in the sky because there was a leak and all the space people died when the space ship exploded." And, on that day, when millions of children in classrooms all over the world had planned to tune in on the flight of Challenger, they watched instead a eulogy being delivered in Houston by President Reagan, which also was a lesson. "The future is not free," he said. "The story of all human progress is one of struggle against all odds.

We learned again that this America, which Abraham Lincoln called the last, best hope of man on Earth, was built on heroism and noble sacrifice." It was built, he said, by the likes of Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe men and women "who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more than was expected or required and who gave it little thought of worldly reward." When the Challenger exploded after 73 seconds of flight on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, only a few thousand people were on hand at Cape Canaveral, Fla. But around the country, schoolchildren, gathering around TVs, cheered when the shuttle lifted off and did its majestic roll, then cried out in horror when it was engulfed in a fearsome white and orange fireball while its booster rockets, breaking free, painted a horrible across the blue sky. Before the day was out hundreds of millions of people had seen replays of the scene. AP Lascrphoto The space shuttle Challenger explodes Jan.

28, 1 986. Challenger's when O-ring damage occurred in both rocket boosters. A backup O-ring, the last-ditch defense against burnthrough, showed the effect of heat. That Jan. 24, 1985, liftoff had taken place when the temperature was 53 degrees at the launch site, the coldest to date.

The Challenger launch was to take place after a night when temperatures were forecast to be in the low 20s and Thiokol engineers argued heatedly that it be postponed. One Marshall official, told about the concerns, responded "my God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch in April?" In the end, WITHOUT the teacher from Concord, N.H., aboard, few would have paid attention to the preparations for Flight Sl-L. Without her, there was nothing to distinguish this mission from the 24 that preceded it. No derring-do was planned; no spacewalks, no satellite rescues, no fancy rehearsals erecting 100-foot solar panels. Challenger was to deliver a satellite to space.

Ho hum. The three commercial television networks didn't consider the launch newsworthy enough to cut into their morning programming. Those roads in the area with a good view of launch pad 34B in spaceport towns like Titusville, Cocoa Beach and Port Canaveral no longer were bumper-to-bumper with cars and campers on launch day. Local ambitious schedule with its four-or-biter shuttle fleet? The Rogers Commission, investigating the tragedy for President Reagan, found troubling lapses in judgment, expertise, communications and management. It called the Challenger explosion "an accident rooted in history" and said the agency had accepted growing risks "because they got away with it the last time." The direct cause of the explosion was a leak at a joint between segments of one of two booster rockets that provide 80 percent of the power to push the orbiter into space.

Superheated gases shot through that leak toward the adjacent fuel tank and triggered the conflagration. CjT OME NASA managers had fear-Ned for years that trouble lurked "in the huge rockets. As early as 1977, an engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama warned superiors that the rocket designed by Morton Thiokol, was unacceptable, that two quarter-inch diameter O-rings intended to seal in the searing gases could leak under pressure. A paper trail that extended from that point until the Challenger explosion showed 17 instances where soot was found on the recovered boosters, indicating they had leaked during their two minutes of flight. The.

worst case had been on a mission almost exactly a year before sheriffs used to claim a million people watching. For recent shuttle liftoffs there were hardly enough spectators to fill a college basketball arena. The shock that followed the explosion was not hard to explain. To Americans, space flight was a matter-of-fact. It had been going on, after all, for a quarter-century.

Ninety million Americans had been born since John Glenn circled the globe; a generation had grown up knowing that people went into space, walked on the moon and returned to Earth with not so much as a scratch. "We have allowed ourselves to be beguiled by space as a place where only beauty and mathematics worked, where there was no disease, where we listened to the music of the spheres, where it was Aristotle and Descartes and Einstein," says John Chancellor, NBC News commentator and space buff. "The idea that you could take this beautiful, pristine, icy-cold, germ-free environment and introduce death and uncertainty and destruction in it made people take it personally." On the day of the accident, Glenn himself commented: "This is the day that NASA has been postponing for 25 years." But was it an accident? Or was it the tragic culmination of a can-do agency gone sloppy and making compromises to meet an increasingly 'This is the day that NASA has been postponing for 25 John Glenn, Jan. 28, 1986 'The space shuttle's solid rocket booster problem began with the faulty design of its joint and increased as both NASA and contractor management first failed to re? cognize it as a problem, then failed to fix it and finally treated it as an acceptable flight The Rogers Commission retrenchment and repair ends Allan McDonald Argued for postponing launch Where are they now? By HARRY F. ROSENTHAL The Associated Press WASHINGTON On the evening before the Challenger liftoff' last year, 12 men took part in a three-state telephone conference to discuss concerns by Morton Thiokol engineers that the shuttle should not be launched after a night of sub-freezing temperatures.

The engineers in Utah lost the argument. Most of the dozen, as well as some top NASA officials involved in the decision to launch, have retired or have been reassigned to other duties in the wake of the Challenger explosion and the death of its crew of seven. Directors of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the shuttle was launched on its ill-fated flight, and the Marshall Space Flight Center, which oversees propulsion systems, resigned. Jesse Moore, head of the shuttle program at the time of the accident but whose appointment as director of the Johnson Space Center in Texas had been put in the works, assumed the Houston post briefly and went on a leave of absence. The argument for postponement was led by Allan McDonald, director of solid rocket motor special pro-, jects for Thiokol, who was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Roger Boisjoly, a Thiokol senior scientist at the firm's headquarters in Utah.

Boisjoly is on a medical leave of absence and McDonald is director of a group that will certify whether the redesigned rocket is ready for flight. Their objections at the 5:45 p.m. PST teleconference between Wasatch, Utah, the Marshall Space nation," McCartney said in an interview. "All of a sudden we realized, with the loss of the shuttle and the problems we had with the Titan and Delta rockets, that we just didn't have the strong launch program that we once perceived we had." Now, a year later, "morale is on the upswing," he said. "The uncertainty of the layoffs is.

behind us, and we are getting a better fix on the modifications that will be required" to prepare the shuttles for 1988. Nearly 2,400 workers, out of a work force of 16,000, were laid off after the Challenger accident as a combined result of the suspension of shuttle flights, the termination of the shuttle-Centaur upper stage contract and the completion of various work projects at the space center. The accident prompted NASA to conduct a detailed self-analysis of the entire space shuttle system, and as a result, says McCartney, "We found a lot of things here that, while they did not contribute to the 51-L (Challenger) accident, should be addressed in a more disciplined system." He cites training, quality control, work hours and shuttle processing methods. The Rogers Commission said NASA had too few quality control inspectors and was critical of the great amount of exhausting overtime by shuttle workers in the weeks before the launch, mainly because the previous flight had a record seven postponements and Challenger had five. New procedures will allow managers to get some rest, even in the face of numerous postponements.

"What happens if we get behind?" McCartney said. "If at any time we feel we are not comfortable with that (February 1988 launch) schedule, you're looking at a fellow who is going to stand up and say I want to extend that schedule "All you have to do is think of what happens if we break another one of those birds." By HOWARD BENEDICT The Associated Press CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. A year of remorse, retrenchment and repair is ending at Kennedy Space Center where NASA is assembling a team of veteran launch officials to prepare plans for returning the nation's surviving shuttles into space during 1988. "People are busy, they're not marking time," says the new NASA director here, Air Force Lt. Gen.

Forrest McCartney. "This time next year we'll have a bird on the pad." Throughout the space center, and engineers clamor around the shuttles Atlantis, Discovery and Columbia fighting to keep up morale and working to ready the ships for the post-Challenger era of spaceflight. The man put in charge of repairing the damage revealed by last January's Challenger accident speaks with optimism for those here who believe that man's destiny is still tied to a machine like the space shuttle. "The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth priorities of this organization is to have a successful mission," the new boss says of his safety-first orientation. He emphasizes that he won't cut any corners to meet the Feb.

18, 1988, target for the next launch. Deputy center director Thomas E. Utsman was named to. head a team of veteran space workers to guide the center through the first few launches. "The intent was to gather people who have a lot of experience and concentrate all that experience on getting those first couple launches off," says Utsman.

"We call ourselves the over-the-hill gang." Discovery, which flew six times before, is to be the first shuttle sent into space since the Challenger explosioh revealed NASA's spindly safety legs, led to layoffs and put McCartney in charge of launch operations. 'Morale is on the upswing. The uncertainty of the layoffs is behind us, and we are getting a better fix on the modifications that will be Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney The memories of last January are close to the surface here.

The Challenger crew cabin is being buried in two abandoned missile silos along with tons of other shuttle wreckage. Launch pad 39A is simply on standby status; pad 39B, used just once, by Challenger, is down for repairs. (And the Vandenburg Air Force Base launch pad, 3,000 miles away and once scheduled for its debut this year, instead has been mothballed until 1992 for use by the ship being built to replace Challenger.) The quiet in the American space program has been practically deafening, with the shuttles awaiting improvements that begin with redesigned solid rocket boosters and end no one knows quite where. Atlantis, attached to an external fuel tank and two solid fuel boster rockets, stands upright on a mobile launch platform in the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building. Discovery and Columbia are surrounded by work platforms in two smaller buildings.

Workers are making modifications recommended by the Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger accident, for several shuttle systems besides the faulty booster rocket joint blamed for the explosion. They include changes to the main engines, external tank and launch support equipment. "I don't think any of us really perceived the impact the loss of Challenger would have on the Flight Center in Alabama and the Kennedy Center were overruled later by four higher Thiokol officials. Joe Kilminster, the vice president of space booster programs who signed the company's OK for launch, now is director of quality and engineering in another Thiokol plant. Robert Lund, vice president of engineering, is now vice president of advanced technology in support services.

Jerald Mason, who was senior vice president of Wasatch operations, retired. Arnold Thompson, supervisor of structures design, is the only one of the six who has essentially the same job at the firm. Stanley R. Reinartz, manager of NASA's special projects office at Marshall who said he told his center director about the Thiokol worries, but not top launch officials was reassigned at his own request, then retired. Lawrence B.

Mulloy, manager of the booster project at Marshall, who six times signed waivers so the shuttle could fly despite evidence of leaks at the booster joints, also has retired,.