Great Engineers & Scientists

That Reagan-is-responsible myth is unfounded. It's the product of one writer with an axe to grind.

James Oberg, noted space expert and consultant to MSNBC has written of the myths surrounding the Challenger disaster, including this one:

Myth #6: Political pressure forced the launch:

There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin. Launch officials clearly felt pressure to get the mission off after repeated delays, and they were embarrassed by repeated mockery on the television news of previous scrubs, but the driving factor in their minds seems to have been two shuttle-launched planetary probes. The first ever probes of this kind, they had an unmovable launch window just four months in the future. The persistent rumor that the White House had ordered the flight to proceed in order to spice up President Reagan's scheduled State of the Union address seems based on political motivations, not any direct testimony or other first-hand evidence. Feynman personally checked out the rumor and never found any substantiation. If Challenger's flight had gone according to plan, the crew would have been asleep at the time of Reagan's speech, and no communications links had been set up. (Emphasis mine.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/myths-about-challenger-shuttle-disaster/#.T7JF-1J14YI

From the Wikipedia article about James Oberg:
As a journalist, he writes for several regular publications, mostly online; he was previously space correspondent for UPI, ABC and currently MSNBC, often in an on-air role. He is a Fellow of the skeptical organization CSICOP and a consultant to its magazine Skeptical Inquirer.

Oberg has no political points to make in defending Reagan. He has a solid reputation as an honest, objective expert.

I based my statement on what I heard on the day of the launch, not subsequent events. The company I worked for at the time supplied the communications equipment for the program.

Of course, I wasn't there.

Respect.

Reminds me of that old saying, 'No good deed goes unpunished'.

You can put a dollar amount on anything these days, and nowhere in "fiduciary responsibility" do they mention honesty or integrity or morality.

Is there a way to say "Amen!" without the religious connotation?

That is true, but the Federal Law did impose the Whistle Blower Protection Act, to protect as well as compensate the Whistle Blower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower

But it still goes without saying,

To blow the whistle on a company, government or a union, when something is wrong or illegal, no matter what you want to call it, takes guts.

And even if there is compensation, once you commit yourself to blow the whistle, there are no guarantees and the only thing in your corner is integrity and courage and nothing more.

Mr Boisjoly was no doubt looked at as a troublemaker for just doing his job, although I'm sure everyone here would have done the same thing...If he would have ignored his findings, he would have been possibly guilty of contributing to negligent homicide...as it is now, no one seems to be guilty...

The best seals for that kind of application is are C-seals. At room temperature they seal as tightly as rubber O-rings, but C-seals are made of metal, usually a high-temperature nickel alloy such a inconel or Waspaloy. C-seals do not stiffen at low temperatures or burn at high temperatures. They install just like O-rings, but in cross section a C-seal looks like the letter C instead of like a solid O. The open side of the C faces towards the pressure, so higher pressure makes it seal more tightly. By the 1980s nearly all jet engines used C-seals or a similar high-vibration variant called an E-seal. The only reason to use an O-ring is cost. O-rings cost pennies; C-seals cost dollars, but jetliners cost millions, and space shuttles cost billions. I suspect that the Morton Thiokol engineers did not initially think of using C-seals because they were missile designers, not aircraft designers. When you make ammunition, a few duds are acceptable. After the Challenger blew up they found out about C-seals and asked the manufacturer, Pressure Science Incorporated (PSI), make some seals for the surviving space shuttles. Unfortunately, the engineer who founded PSI (I think his name was Lambert) had recently died. He was replaced by an accountant appointed by the new owner, EG&G. The accountant calculated that the profit on such a small order not worth bothering with. I don't think it crossed his mind that saving the Shuttle Program was the right thing to do, or that telling NASA to buzz off might be bad for business. Morton Thiokol and NASA had to used extra extra backup O-rings and hope that they wouldn't all burn through. PSI's accountant tried to force his other customers to design their engines around PSI's standard seal sizes. When PSI's patents ran out, the customers when elsewhere. The lesson here is that high-tech companies like Morton Thiokol, PSI, and Apple should be run by people like Boisjoly, Lambert, and Jobs who understand the technology and what their customers need. Bean counters should only run accounting firms.

That's the way it used to be.... now the bean counters have taken over and run nearly everything, except the Government of course, probably where we need them the most...