NASA's Budget Rose by 56% After Challenger Exploded

Gary North - September 26, 2020

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. The seven crew members were killed instantly.

An investigation into the cause of this catastrophe revealed that the director of NASA had been warned not to launch that day. It was too cold. The engineers of the company that manufactured the first-stage rocket knew that there could be a catastrophic failure of what was known as the O-rings, which held the rocket together. They lost flexibility when frozen. The engineers had told the head of the project that this was a real possibility. They were all opposed to the launch. But the head of the project refused to block the launch.

This is not surprising. Wikipedia explains why.

By 1985, with seven of nine shuttle launches that year using boosters displaying O-ring erosion or hot gas blow-by, Marshall and Thiokol realized that they had a potentially catastrophic problem on their hands. Perhaps most concerning was the launch of STS-51-B in April 1985, flown by Challenger, in which the worst O-ring damage to date was discovered in post-flight analysis. The primary O-ring of the left nozzle had been eroded so extensively that it had failed to seal, and for the first time hot gases had eroded the secondary O-ring. They began the process of redesigning the joint with three inches (76 mm) of additional steel around the tang. This tang would grip the inner face of the joint and prevent it from rotating. They did not call for a halt to shuttle flights until the joints could be redesigned, but rather treated the problem as an acceptable flight risk. For example, Lawrence Mulloy, Marshall's manager for the SRB project since 1982, issued and waived launch constraints for six consecutive flights. Thiokol even went as far as to persuade NASA to declare the O-ring problem "closed". Donald Kutyna, a member of the Rogers Commission, later likened this situation to an airline permitting one of its planes to continue to fly despite evidence that one of its wings was about to fall off.

The company got its money from NASA. The head of the company did not want to anger NASA. So, the company pretended everything was all right, and this pleased NASA.

NASA then tried to cover this up. But it finally came out during the hearings.

At first, the head of the program, Stanley Reinartz, shifted blame to the manufacturer. He testified:

At the end of the two-and-a-half-hour period, including an approximately 35-minute-off-the-loop Thiokol caucus, and after their recommendation, their final recommendation, to launch, I collectively asked all telecon parties if there were any disagreement with Thiokol's rationale and recommendation as stated by Mr. Kilminster.

There were none received from Thiokol at Wasatch, Marshall at Huntsville, nor Mr. McDonald, who was sitting with Mr. Mulloy and myself at KSC. Thiokol was then asked to document their verbal rationale and launch recommendation statement, as is our normal practice.

Based on the process I described and the conclusions reached as a result of that process, including the contractor recommendation and the Marshall engineering support, I concurred with the decision of the Level III project manager, Mr. Mulloy, supporting the launch recommendation and continuing with the launch process.

This was standard CMA testimony. But then the story unraveled.

What was the result? For the rest of the year, NASA's budget remained the same. The next year, 1987, saw a major increase in NASA's budget. Over the next few years, it rose 56%.

How could this be?

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE FAILURE

In a profit-seeking company, failure leads to replacement of senior management if the failure is on the scale of the Challenger explosion. That is not how it works in a government bureaucracy.

In a government bureaucracy, almost no one is ever fired. It is too difficult to fire them. They're protected by civil service laws. They are merely reassigned.

On April 3, 1986, this story appeared in The Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON —The chief of the space shuttle project office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has asked to leave the post “for health and other personal reasons” and will be replaced April 14, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced Wednesday.

In a statement released in Washington and at the Marshall center in Huntsville, Ala., NASA said veteran rocket engineer Stanley Reinartz was being reassigned to his former position as manager of the space agency’s special projects office, a post he had held until he took overall responsibility for Marshall’s shuttle activities last August.

It gets worse.

Appearing before the presidential commission investigating the catastrophe, Reinartz acknowledged that he had made the decision not to inform top management of the extensive weather discussions held between Thiokol and NASA engineers on the night before launch.

Defended Decision

It was a decision that he staunchly defended in his appearance before the shuttle panel and again in a press conference after commission Chairman William P. Rogers declared that NASA’s decision-making process before the launch was “clearly flawed.”

Reinartz could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

He was allowed to retire quietly the following November. He took his pension and disappeared.

Why did he retire?

Officials at the Huntsville, Ala., center said Reinartz left the agency rather than be transferred to NASA headquarters in Washington to become deputy director for the shuttle support program.

"In lieu of accepting that position, he decided to exercise his option and retire," said Marshall spokesman Terry Eddleman.

It was just too embarrassing to be demoted to mere deputy director of the shuttle support program. After all, he had run the program. The humiliation was just too much to bear.

Heads did not roll. Heads merely took their pensions and went away.

The other Marshall officials who have resigned since the Challenger explosion include William Lucas, the center's longtime director; Lawrence Mulloy, the booster program manager; James Kingsbury, chief engineer at Marshall, and George Hardy, who worked directly under Kingsbury as assistant director of science and engineering.

Here is how things work in government. This is from The Chicago Tribune (June 18, 1986).

NASA Administrator James Fletcher told the subcommittee that he accepted the findings of the President`s commission on the Challenger disaster, which did not assess individual blame.

The commission, chaired by former Secretary of State William Rogers, found that a rocket failure caused the explosion. But it also cited a broad array of managerial problems in NASA and in the rocket manufacturer that had led to the accident.

''They have been removed from the chain of command, and they will be disciplined in accordance with the procedures that we always follow,''

Fletcher told the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space.

''I wouldn't call it disciplinary, but they have been removed from the chain of command and they will have in their record an indication of the mistakes and the severity of the mistakes that they made.''

I also would not call it disciplinary. I would call it business as usual.

Sadly, the Netflix documentary on Challenger does not mention any of this. It would have been a far better documentary if it had.

NOT ENOUGH MONEY!

Why did NASA's budget rise? Whenever there is a major failure in a government agency, the agency always blames a lack of funding. It argues that the politicians were too cheap. They didn't allocate sufficient money to enable the government agency to do its job properly.

Here is the policy: wash, rinse, repeat.

Wikipedia reports:

Although changes were made by NASA after the Challenger accident, many commentators have argued that the changes in its management structure and organizational culture were neither deep nor long-lasting.

After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, attention once again focused on the attitude of NASA management towards safety issues. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) concluded that NASA had failed to learn many of the lessons of Challenger. In particular, the agency had not set up a truly independent office for safety oversight; the CAIB decided that in this area, "NASA's response to the Rogers Commission did not meet the Commission's intent". The CAIB believed that "the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed", saying that the same "flawed decision making process" that had resulted in the Challenger accident was responsible for Columbia's destruction seventeen years later.

This follows a fundamental principle of government bureaucracies: "If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail again."