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A Management Decision

The night before the space shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, a three-way teleconference was held between Morton-Thiokol, Incorporated (MTI) in Utah; the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, AL; and the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. This teleconference was organized at the last minute to address temperature concerns raised by MTI engineers who had learned that overnight temperatures for January 27 were forecast to drop into the low 20s and potentially upper teens, and they had nearly a decade of data and documentation showing that the shuttle’s O-rings performed increasingly poorly the lower the temperature dropped below 60-70 degrees. The forecast high for January 28 was in the low-to-mid-30s; space shuttle program specifications stated unequivocally that the solid rocket boosters – the two white stereotypical rocket-looking devices on either side of the orbiter itself, and the equipment for which MTI was the sole-source contractor – should never be operated below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Every moment of this teleconference is crucial, but here I’ll focus on one detail in particular. Launch go / no-go votes had to be unanimous (i.e., not just a majority). MTI’s original vote can be summarized thusly: “Based on the presentation our engineers just gave, MTI recommends not launching.” MSFC personnel, however, rejected and pushed back strenuously against this recommendation, and MTI managers caved, going into an offline-caucus to “reevaluate the data.” During this caucus, the MTI general manager, Jerry Mason, told VP of Engineering Robert Lund, “Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.” And Lund instantly changed his vote from “no-go” to “go.”

This vote change is incredibly significant. On the MTI side of the teleconference, there were four managers and four engineers present. All eight of these men initially voted against the launch; after MSFC’s pressure, all four engineers were still against launching, and all four managers voted “go,” but they ALSO excluded the engineers from this final vote, because — as Jerry Mason said in front of then-President Reagan’s investigative Rogers Commission in spring 1986 — “We knew they didn’t want to launch. We had listened to their reasons and emotion, but in the end we had to make a management decision.”

A management decision.

Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Commander Michael John Smith, Pilot Ellison S. Onizuka, Mission Specialist One Judith Arlene Resnik, Mission Specialist Two Ronald Erwin McNair, Mission Specialist Three S.Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist One Gregory Bruce Jarvis, Payload Specialist Two

Edit 1: holy shit thanks so much for all the love and awards. I can’t wait till my dad sees all this. He’s gonna be ecstatic.