Abstract

Engineers' Duty To Speak Out

If somebody saw something going on that was unsafe, they'd probably say something about it to their supervisor, but in NASA, not many people would go outside with that information if their complaints were ignored. For eight years before the space shuttle Challenger's seventy-three-second flight, on January 28, engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and at Morton Thiokol knew that its huge solid-fuel booster rockets were badly designed. And the night before the fatal launch, many of them feared the infamous O-rings would fail. A number of those engineers voiced their concerns, sometimes vigorously, to their superiors in the corporate hierarchy and the NASA bureaucracy. They were ignored, and no one went to the press or to a member of U.S. Congress.