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The Chilling Truth About NASA And The Space Shuttle
Interview With Richard C. Cook, Former NASA Analyst, 26 June 2008
Part I of II
Ken: Our guest today is Richard Cook a former NASA analyst, one of the key figures in the Challenger investigation and the author of the popular book, Challenger Revealed. Hello Mr. Cook, may I call you Richard, you can call me Ken? Richard C. Cook: Yes that is fine. Ken: Okay. Richard C. Cook: Well, I was a professional federal government analyst. I came to work for the federal government in 1970. I worked originally at the U.S. Civil Service Commission. I went on from there to work at the Food and Drug Administration and then the Jimmy Carter White House. I was there till the end of the Carter administration and stayed on for a year, when the Reagan administration came in and worked in the consumer affairs area. I left the government for a couple of years and came back into the government in the summer of 1985, I was hired at NASA at that time, as a resource analyst for the solid rocket boosters and the external tank. I was working in NASA for about six months in the comptrollers office, at NASA headquarters in Washington, when the Challenger disaster took place.
Tell us a little about your book and where it can be purchased?
Cover Of Challenger Revealed Richard C. Cook: The book is called, "Challenger Revealed". The subtitle is, "How The Reagan Administration Caused The Greatest Tragedy Of The Space Age". It is a hard cover book, it is published by Thunder's Mouth Press and it is available in bookstores and can be ordered through all of the major online publishers. Ken: Before we get into that disaster I would like ask you about a few things first I have always felt that the space shuttle was designed in such a way that it was far too dangerous for the astronauts and far too expensive to operate. For one thing, it doesn't even have ejection seats for low altitude escape. What do you think about the shuttle? Richard C. Cook: Well the shuttle as it was initially designed was a compromise vehicle that had a lot of features that were built into it to make it a military launch vehicle. This went back to the Nixon administration. The original space shuttle that was conceived of by the NASA engineers, was a smaller vehicle, it would have been much safer and it would have really been the eventual first step to a return to the moon. The way that the Nixon administration designed it, it was really a vehicle that was going to be very large, very heavy and was going to be used for military purposes, as well as civilian space purposes. That is what accounted for a lot of the compromise features that made it as large and as unwieldy as it was, including the tile system that they used on the bottom of the shuttle, that has been problematic ever since it was first thought of. The space shuttle was overbuilt and it was overbuilt for purposes of launching military missions as well as civilian missions. Ken: Why was the design that had essentially two rockets strapped to it accepted over the one that had a vehicle mounted on the tip of a standard rocket? Richard C. Cook: The shuttle was something that they wanted to reuse. The whole purpose of having an airplane type design, was to be able to use it over and over again, in and out of low earth orbit. Now the old capsules that were used in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were really built for much longer distances. To travel to the moon eventually, it was a lunar program from the very beginning. These were one time capsules that were used for unique missions, but with the shuttle they wanted what they called a space truck and they wanted to be able to use it over and over again, for every type of mission. The trouble is it was built too big and too heavy to be truly safe.
Unfortunate Crew Of The Challenger
So you feel that the real reason for the shuttle is military weapons testing? Richard C. Cook: The military at that time was going to use it primarily for satellite launch. These military spy satellites that they put up are really enormous. They are much bigger than your usual communications satellite that you put up for telephone, or weather observation, or that sort of thing. In order to launch these huge military satellites, they needed a tremendous amount of booster thrust. The unmanned rockets that they were using gave that thrust, but NASA in order to get the shuttle approved by Congress, had to get the military on board. The way that they did this was by promising thrust in a manned vehicle that was equivalent to the unmanned. That is what really made it too heavy and unsafe. Is the shuttle capable of better performance than we have been led to believe? For example does it have a greater range than we have been told? Richard C. Cook: Not really. The shuttle can go past the one to two hundred nautical mile range, it is really a low earth orbit vehicle. That limits it's use to the kind of environments that you use for low orbiting satellites, or the International Space Station. The shuttle can't even deliver a geosynchronous satellite to high earth orbit. You need booster rockets fired out of the shuttle, in order to do that and those produce their own safety problems. All of this being done in a manned vehicle makes the shuttle extremely expensive, even to launch one time and extremely unsafe, because you know right now, whenever a space shuttle is launched to go to the International Space Station, the number one issue is whether they will even come back, if it is safe to even get into orbit and back again? The Challenger was a terrible disaster that many people say could have been avoided. Please tell us what caused it and what transpired the day that the Challenger launch was authorized. Richard C. Cook: Well the cause of the Challenger disaster is very complex. Basically, because the shuttle is so complex and unsafe as it is, you need to take extraordinary precautions every time the shuttle is sent up. There were a number of hardware features on the shuttle that were not performing the way that they were supposed to, or the way that NASA should have had them perform. The biggest problem at the time, or at least the one that was most visible, was with the main engines, because the main engines were having a lot of different problems that were causing them to shut down in flight. There was one instance where one engine was lost and another engine might have shut down and a catastrophic accident occur then, but they were able to work around that. There were major problems on the main engines that NASA was still working on even as they were increasing their flight rate back in 1985, 1986. The other major problems had to do with the tile system, because the tiles were always very sensitive. The type of accident that destroyed Columbia in 2003 was foreseen, even before the shuttle ever flew, when they were trying to get the tile system right. There was always a problem with the debris falling from the external tank. Again that contributed to the Columbia disaster. Then there were these problems going on with the solid rocket boosters, of various types. The main problem with the solid rocket boosters was the seals in the separated segments of the solid rocket boosters were constantly showing signs of heat distress or erosion, because flames were leaking through the interior of the solid rocket boosters and getting into the joints that held the things together. These joints were sealed with "o" rings and a sort of thermal protective putty. This was also not performing properly and had been compromised. NASA knew about all of these things, but they were just not able to stop at any given point and fix them. Again it goes back to the fact that the shuttle itself is so sensitive., so complex and has so many potential problems that you have to be incredibly careful and cautious, every time that you launch the shuttle. This of course limits the number of times that you can launch it and adds to the cost of launching it, so there is a tremendous potential at any given time of compromising safety. Up until the Challenger disaster they were cutting so many corners that they lost it and the same thing happened with Columbia, they were continuing to cut corners at that time and they lost another one. As far as the specific flaw in the "o" ring joints, one of the things that I document in my book is that even though the engineers at Thiokol knew about these problems for well over a year and knew that cold temperatures tremendously aggravated the problem, NASA was not willing to stop flights. In fact the engineers at Thiokol, who knew about the cold temperature problems, were told specifically by officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center, not to mention these in flight readiness reviews, because they didn't want any interference with the military missions that were planned to be launched at Edward's Air Force Base in California. I consider that to be one of the primary causes of the Challenger disaster. Why are "O" rings used in the shuttle? Isn't there any other method that could be used as a seal that would be more reliable? Richard C. Cook: The problem with the seal is that it moves, it's flexible. Ken: I was going to ask you about that later. Richard C. Cook: That is going to be the case in any rocket that is built with joints. That of course goes back to the original design and the original design with jointed segments was put into place because it was the only way that they could reuse the rockets. Each of those rocket segments was designed to be used multiple times. The only way to transport something that big, once it came down to the ocean and get it back to the factory to have the fuel put back in it, was by breaking it down into segments. They had that problem from the very start. When you have a rocket with segments, as I said, the segments are always going to move. When ignition occurs, that whole thing just fills up, kind of like a balloon. You have got to be able to move within the gap, in order to fill the gap, that is why they chose the "o" rings for that purpose. Now even before the shuttle ever flew, they were told by the manufacturer of the "o" rings, that the product was not meant to be used in that manner. An "o" ring is a pressure seal and it does have to move slightly to fill a gap, but to move in these directions that these "o" rings were moving to fill a joint were viewed initially has unsafe. That is another reason why this was such a problem for them, because they had a design issue that they were never able to overcome. When they realized that the redundancy has been lost, with the second "o" ring, because of the way that the segments of the rocket spread, they really didn't put anything in place to counter that. After the Challenger disaster, they came up with a new design that has a third "o" ring and a different type of putty, so that even as of today, they are still flying with a joint that has a moving "o" ring within it. Now they have triple redundancy and since the Challenger disaster they have had no more catastrophes to several rocket boosters. This is a feature that has always existed on segmented solid rockets, even before Challenger, in the sixties and early seventies, they were flying solid rockets to launch satellites with an "o" joint that had the "o" ring moving within the joint and they did see times of heat distress on those "o" rings. So no matter how you do it, if you are going to have a jointed rocket using solid fuel, you are going to have something like "o" rings and you are going to have the possibility of an "o" ring leak, so that is just another reason why you have to be tremendously cautious and conservative whenever you launch any of these things, especially in a manned environment.
Ice At Challenger Launch Site
The Challenger was destroyed only 73 seconds into it's flight. Would an ejection system have saved any lives in that case? Richard C. Cook: My contention at the time, on what was based on what I felt was pretty solid information from engineers was yes, it probably could have. The problem with that was that the orbiter, the winged airplane, is the vehicle that the crew is flying on. It has a double decker seat. In the original design for the space shuttle, when they flew the first two missions, uh I think it was actually the first four missions, four experimental missions, they did have an ejection seat on it. The ejection seat, or the ejection capsule was to allow the two astronauts, the pilot and the commander to eject. They were never able to figure out how to create a ejection capsule that would be big enough and safe enough to allow the entire crew to eject, if you had more than two astronauts. This is because you have a second deck, a lower deck, with the mission specialists on it and when they went to their fifth mission and started to fly more than two astronauts, they took out that feature. Also, in order to have an ejection system, you need a sensor system that will tell you immediately if an "o" ring has burnt through. They did not have this on the Challenger, so the astronauts had no idea, until it blew up, that anything was even wrong, although looking at the photographs of the launch, as you know, you can see the flame leaks coming out of the side of the Challenger within milliseconds of ignition. You would need a sensor system to alert them and then you would need a capsule system to eject them at that point, before the vehicle was going too fast. Now some people have said that the speed, given the design of the orbiter, would have precluded any type of ejection system, but again I think that's because you've got such a large crew capsule to accommodate more than two astronauts. Ken: The Roger's Commission found that the accident was the fault of NASA, do you think that this was a cover up to protect the president? Richard C. Cook: Well, yes I do and I think that when I went through all the different steps of what happened during the days and the night before the launch, I do believe that it was a cover up and that the commission itself was a part of, to prevent any hint that orders from the White House, to launch Challenger in time for the State of the Union Address, or for the publicity that this teacher in space program had on a part in the launch decision. I concluded and I think on the basis of one eye witness to the decision, as well as all of the circumstantial evidence, that there was in fact a cover up of White House pressure to launch. Tell us what documents you turned over to the New York Times and what they proved? Richard C. Cook: There were a whole series of papers that I had written prior to the Challenger disaster that documented the history of the "o" ring problems. There was a waiver that was granted back in 1983, almost three years before the disaster, that demonstrated that NASA was aware, because of the way that the "o" ring joints bulged at liftoff, it is called joint rotation. The redundancy of the dual overriding system had been compromised. some of the papers had to do with documenting that and this was a very significant set of documents that were being brought up repeatedly during the commission hearings, including some of the closed hearings, which demonstrated that NASA knew that the system was no longer redundant. If you had a problem with the primary "o" ring at liftoff, it could very well destroy the whole system, which is what happened. That was a very key document. The engineer that gave me that document, called it the death document, because it described exactly how the Challenger disaster occurred. In addition to that there were reports of concern about the "o" rings that had gone to various meetings within the office of space flight in the last two to three years. There was a document that showed "o" ring problems as being a major agenda item for James Beggs , administrator of NASA. It was part of a major budget package. then there were my own memos that I wrote. One of them, written in July of 1985, which documented the concerns of the solid rocket booster engineers, that there was a potential catastrophic problem with the "o" rings. Then I wrote an additional memo after the disaster, where I concluded that the accident was likely a preventable accident. I would like to say that it took great courage to do what you did. Did you ever regret this decision in later years? Richard C. Cook: No I never regretted the decision. I felt that I did what I had to do at the time. There was a cover up going on in NASA, everyone was expected to keep their mouths shut. The commission itself was kind of tip toeing around the issue. The commission was beginning to talk to NASA about some of these things, but it was fairly clear that the commission was mainly doing a public relations job that eventually was not going to really result in any public disclosure of what the actual problems were. I made a decision at the time, to disrupt the cover up and give the press enough of the documents to prove that NASA knew what the problem had been. I left NASA just a few days after my commission testimony. I spent the next twenty one years working in the U.S. Treasury department, doing other kinds of work and even though the impact on my career was largely negative, I felt that I did what I had to do as a public servant. Right, oh that was something. Some people have called the shuttle a disaster waiting to happen, do you agree with that statement? Richard C. Cook: Yes I do and the reason I do is that the decision to continue to fly...... the term used in NASA when you knew that you had a problem and you weren't going to stop and fix it was, "fly as is", that is a term that I used in a number of places in my book. The determination by NASA to "fly as is", with the "o" ring problem and there have been similar cases with the other problems, such as the main engines as I mention earlier, but that decision was a decision to fly with the risk of dangerous error. From that standpoint it was a preventable accident and it should not have happened.
Leak On Right Side Of Challenger
Is it true that the launch of Challenger was delayed so that then Vice President Bush could watch?\ Richard C. Cook: No I don't believe that it was. I read all of that documentation very carefully. Vice President Bush was actually scheduled to come down to the Kennedy Space Center and witness the launch the Sunday before the actual Challenger launch took place, which was on a Tuesday. The launch on that day, Sunday, was cancelled by acting administrator William Graham, even though Bush was supposed to attend. There was no delay that I was aware of, or could find, because of Bush's presence, it was almost the other way around. The actual launch day that had been scheduled, that Sunday, was a perfect day for launch. It was very suspicious to me all the way around why Graham actually cancelled the launch on that day and it was also viewed as unusual by some of the other people who were at Kennedy observing events. In fact astronaut, John Young asked who made the stupid decision to cancel that day, because in normal circumstance, even if they got an unfavorable weather report they would still board the astronauts on board and just wait for a break in the weather and take advantage of that and go ahead and launch, but they didn't do that. I traced through that whole decision in my book and reached a conclusion that, because of an obscure launch rule having to do with how many days in a row you can tank the liquid oxygen and hydrogen for the external tank. Graham,or whoever made that decision, seemed to feel that they would have a better launch opportunities between that day and the date of the President's State of the Union speech which was Tuesday, if they postponed the Sunday launch date. That is all in my book and it is in some fairly complex technical language, but that was the level at which the NASA officials were working and I believe that was why the decision was made. Ken: Challenger had a lot of problems before takeoff that delayed it several times, such as problems with the hatch. A micro switch indicated that it was open, when it wasn't, then a stripped bolt caused another problem. Was there any reasons for these problems such as lax maintenance or insufficient device checks? Richard C. Cook: Well, it is very hard to trace the exact causes. Some of these hardware issues that affected previous shuttle launches were very complex and some of them were traced back to error by people that were doing the maintenance. Some of it was traceable back to worker fatigue, because of the tremendously complex and ambitious launch schedule that they were under, so there were a lot of things like that. The main reason that the Challenger launch was delayed in the first place was because the previous mission of Columbia was delayed at landing at the Kennedy Space Center. I happened to be down at the Kennedy Space Center on January 16th and 17th in 1985, I was going to witness the landing of Columbia there at the landing strip, but it was waved off, because of unsettled weather. They had to send Columbia back out to California to land at Edwards, but in order to launch Challenger, which was on the launch pad at the time, they needed to cannibalize parts from Columbia. What that meant was that they had to pull the parts out of Columbia, fly them across country to Kennedy and then install them on Challenger. NASA never told the public about this, they covered up the fact that they had to do this, because it was embarrassing. What they told the press was that there was potential bad weather at the shuttle landing strip in Africa, or something like that which was absurd, because the real delays came because of the tight off schedule. and the need to get the spare parts off of Columbia. So this had already happened and caused a delay to Challenger going into the weekend before the actual disaster took place and then as I say, the postponement on Sunday came because of a misjudgment, I believe, by the launch officials at that time. That took you down to Monday where the hatch got stuck and you stripped the bolt. I have never seen a truly satisfactorily explanation for how all that happened, but when you are dealing with that kind of very complex hardware and it doesn't work right the very first time, it is just like fixing your car. If the bolt doesn't come out, then you are going to have to work on it. By the time they were ready to get it fixed, it was too late in the launch window for that day. So they just said for everybody to go back to their quarters and they would try again tomorrow morning. The problem with the next day was that they had this terrible cold front blowing in from the continental air mass that was going to freeze everything up. They immediately went into a panic mode to try and get themselves situated so they could go ahead and launch on Tuesday, even though this cold temperature front was moving in and the engineers were starting to be very, very upset about what that could do not only to the "O" rings, but also about creating ice on the launch pad. You had a whole series of circumstances there, but again, if you were exercising due caution with your hardware and with your launch schedule, all this stuff you could accommodate. The fact was they were under tremendous pressure and the commission never explained where this pressure came from. I think that I have demonstrated in my book that it came from the White House. Ken: You mean to say that they didn't have spare parts available? Richard C. Cook: This was a big problem with the shuttle orbiters. They were short on spare parts and if you read for example, the report that was done after the commission by the House Science and Technology Committee and get into some of these hardware issues, we used the phrase, "the long pole in the tent", as to what was holding up the program and spare parts were the long pole in the tent. There were so many different parts, including electrical generation units, small thruster rockets that are used to maneuver the vehicle around in space, computer parts, all of these things.... There is thousands and thousands of parts and every time you launched the shuttle you had a shortage of parts, so that they had to take some parts out of the other orbiters that had just flown and put it into the current orbiter. This is what actually caused the initial delay in the Challenger launch.
Challenger Tank Explodes Ken: Well I've got to tell you, I never knew that one. Is it true that the minimum temperature for a safe launch of the shuttle was 31degrees F or -1 Centigrade and yet the minimum temperature recommended by some Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the external fuel tanks, stated that the temperature should be above 53°F (12°C), for the "O" rings to seal properly. Why was there this discrepancy? Richard C. Cook: Well what you say is exactly true in terms of what actually happened at the Kennedy Space Center. The entire shuttle system had a minimum temperature of around 30 to 31 degrees. That means that you weren't supposed to launch below that air temperature. There were other instrumentation packages aboard the shuttle that had their own temperature limitations. Very few people realize that the night before the launch, NASA wrote a number of waivers to these temperature constraints in order to allow the vehicle to be launched, even without reference to the "O" rings themselves. Again all of these are in my book. The reason that the 53 degree temperature constraint came into play was that back in January of 1985, NASA had launched a space shuttle from Florida and it was during another cold spell and it was what they called at that time the cold snap of the century, of course it was repeated a year later with Challenger, but back then in January of 1985, they'd launched in cold temperatures and they had a record number of four "O" rings showing heat distress. Coming out of that mission, Thiokol put together a series of laboratory tests of the "O" rings to show, that demonstrated that even below a temperature of 75 degrees Farenheit, the "O" rings began to show signs that they were getting stiff and could not perform up to the level that they needed to perform to fill the extrusion gaps as they were called, in the solid rocket boosters. The temperature at the launch of the shuttle in January of 1985 and this was a temperature not of the air temperature, but of the calculated joint temperature of the solid rocket booster "O" ring joints was 53 degrees. Because they saw so much heat distress at 53 degrees and because their lab tests were starting to tell them that anything below 75 degrees could potentially compromise the "O" ring joint, when the Challenger launch came up in January of 1986 and the engineers began to hear about the cold wave that was moving into Florida, they met together, just the engineers, they said what do we think a safe launch temperature would be? The conclusion was that we should only launch at a higher temperature than what we saw a year ago and that was a calculated joint temperature of 53 degrees, so in absence of any other number, that was the number that the engineers of Thiokol picked as a safe launch temperature. To NASA this was very upsetting, because there is a big difference between 53 degrees as you say and 31 degrees. This was kind of what they used to challenge Thiokol with, even though they themselves knew that these temperature problems had existed and were a major issue. Alan McDonald, who was the chief managing engineer for Thiokol at the Kennedy Space Center, after that long teleconference the night before the disaster, when the Thiokol executives had backed down under NASA pressure and voted four to nothing to agree to the launch, Alan McDonald testified before the presidential commission that he said to NASA at the Kennedy Space Center that if anything happens to this vehicle, I would not want to be the one to have to sit there before a board of inquiry and explain why they launched a vehicle that was only qualified down to 31 degrees. What McDonald was referring to was the air temperature where NASA was planning to launch, given the air temperature, at sub-freezing temperatures that morning., er the following morning. So he was referring to the 31 degree constraint. Whether you look at that, or you look at the 53 degree temperature constraint coming from the engineers, everybody at Thiokal was saying that basically it was too cold to launch Challenger, don't do it, except the four managers at Thiokol who voted to approve the launch after NASA pressured them. End of Part I |
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