Challenger Disaster Research Paper

Sultan Albusaidi

MEEN 1000

9/21/15

Dr. Nandika Anne D’Souza

The Challenger Disaster occurred in 1968 in Florida, USA. It was a tragic incident that resulted in the death of everyone who was in the space shuttle. The accident happened due to a mechanical failure. It all began when the O-ring failed at liftoff, which then caused a breach allowing burning gas to reach the outside and thus cause it to blow up.

There is an engineering ethics that every engineer should follow; however the engineers that were working on the space shuttle didn’t follow some of those ethics. The first thing that was mentioned in the fundamental cannons was that “Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties”. However, this was the opposite of what

happened, the temperatures were not right, but because of some delays in the past they ignored it and decided to launch the space shuttle, thus resulting in the death of seven human beings. Yes the engineers didn’t recommend the space shuttle to launch but they should have done more and prevented it from launching.
The whistleblower in this case was Roger Boisjoly, he warned NASA and the commission that a disaster is going to happen. He gave the commission the history of the O-ring problems that happened before, but he still gave the decision to launch.
The alternative way and the better way was if he refused to launch the space ship because of the cold temperature and the O-ring problem.

Safely always comes first no matter how important the project is.

The conflict of interest happened when the congress expected that the challenger would be financially supportive by NASA because of the over spending which then forced NASA to operate as pseudo commercial and cause problems. After the disaster happened it caught the attention of the public and media, which then resulted in more tension on the case, because everyone wanted to know what happened and how it happened. The information they gave at first was not very clear and a lot of things were kept a secret, but after a while because of all the pressure more information was given about the incident.

There were also some communication flaws, which resulted in the accident; failure in communication has resulted in the launch of the challenger over misleading information. There was a conflict between some of the engineers and NASA management about the safety of the space shuttle. All of this could have been averted if everyone communicated clearly and trusted each

other.
NASA should take full responsibility of the accident. Because it was their space shuttle, and they were working on it mostly. They should have communicated better with everyone who was involved in the project and must not have lunched the challenger unless everyone agreed and nothing was debatable.
The level of responsibility in this particular case should be very high, because people lives are on the line, plus the billion that are spent on the project. A person in this situation should be very careful and responsible. He/she should be aware all the time.
The disaster was mainly caused by the defective O-ring, yes it was the main problem, but it’s not the only problem. If everyone communicated better and a bigger budget was given. The incident would have been prevented.