The night before Challenger, engineers said not to launch in the cold

On the night before the Challenger launch, Brian Russell sat in a conference room in Utah while his company put NASA on mute.

Russell was a young engineer at Morton Thiokol, the company that built the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. That day, NASA had asked every contractor whether the forecast overnight cold gave them any concern. When his boss came to his cubicle, Russell immediately answered, the O-rings. The O-rings were rubber seals that had to stay flexible to block superhot gas from escaping the joints between booster sections, and test data showed they became very hard in the cold and did not behave in a rubbery fashion.

Challenger launched the next morning and broke apart shortly after liftoff. The night before, Russell and his fellow engineers on the Thiokol booster team had recommended against launching if the O-ring temperature was colder than 53 degrees. That same evening, managers polled only senior leaders, withdrew that recommendation, and approved the flight.

The turn came on a telephone review with NASA. When Thiokol presented its temperature limit, NASA's lead program manager for the boosters answered, "My Thiokol, when do you expect me to launch, next April?" Russell said the remark shook the room because the engineers thought their case had been logical, and he suddenly realized the tables were turning.

Thiokol's plant program manager then asked for a five minute private caucus. The company muted the phone, leaving NASA waiting, and the five minutes stretched to 35. Inside, the general manager favored launching. Two senior Thiokol engineers, Roger Boisjoly and Arnie Thompson, rose to make the case for delay and, as Russell put it, "stood at the head of the table," pointing at charts and photographs and arguing for delay, until the general manager said, "We've plowed this ground already." Then the debate stopped.

Russell, among the youngest in the room, asked himself if he would be the only one to disagree and whether he had the courage to say so. He never got the chance. The general manager polled only the senior leaders. One by one, they agreed to launch. When the vice president of engineering hesitated, the general manager told him to "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat."

Back off mute, Thiokol told NASA it agreed to launch. Russell, as the junior man, typed up the final chart approving flight. "I wish I'd have just walked away." In the hallway on the way out that night, he told Boisjoly that before they had only needed to show a flight was safe in order to fly, while this time they had been asked to show it was unsafe in order to stop.

The next morning, Russell watched from the floor near the back of a company conference room, up on his knees and sick with nerves. The engineers had expected a seal failure and explosion on the launchpad. When Challenger cleared the tower, a manager beside him said, "We dodged a bullet." Russell thought, "I wish I could be sure."

Moments later, past the call for throttle up, the shuttle exploded in the sky. After a replay, Russell thought, "That's our problem." He walked downstairs to Boisjoly's office and found him in tears. Back at his cubicle, he sat in a daze while people wandered the halls and no work got done, thinking about the astronauts who were gone.