Title: No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time

Author: Claus Jensen

ISBN:

Summary

No Downlink is a review of the history of the United States space program culminating with a discussion of the Challenger accident. The book reviews both the actual incident as well as the organizational failures that led inevitably to the accident.

The author is Danish and the book was originally published in Denmark in 1993. It was translated by Barbara Haveland and published in English in 1996. The book is well written with a bibliography and references. Anyone who is interested in NASA or the US space program should give No Downlink a read if for no other reason than to see the difference between the NASA of Apollo and the NASA of the space shuttle.

The Challenger, a member of NASA’s space shuttle fleet, exploded during its ascent approximately 70 seconds after liftoff in January of 1986. President Ronald Reagan immediately called for an investigation into the accident to determine its causes. The Reagan Administration appointed the Rogers Commission with the assignment of reviewing NASA shuttle procedures so as to propose changes to make the shuttle program safer.

The book provides a case study for the student of system failure. The particular event, the Challenger accident, could have been prevented at several points. During the RFP and contract let process, the solid rocket booster (SRB) contract could have been let to a more capable supplier. The SRB supplier identified an issue with the SRB seals and could have implemented an engineering change to the SRB seals when the problem was first identified rather than after the accident. The launch itself could have been postponed since the weather conditions were colder than the manufacturer’s specified lower limit, a cold that affected the functionality of the seals to the point of failure.

The author’s thesis is that budget, schedule, and political pressures on the shuttle program ensured that an accident of some kind was inevitable.

To bolster his thesis, Jensen references Charles Perrow’s book Normal Accidents, an investigation into the accidents that invariably accompany the implementation and use of complex systems. These accidents, because they are a product of the system complexity and the limitations of human beings to manage complex systems, Perrow terms normal accidents. The Challenger accident is an example of such a normal accident. Not only was the Challenger a complex piece of machinery with areas of non-redundant yet critical functionality, the system that developed and managed the shuttle, NASA and its subcontractors, was also a complex system.

No Downlink begins with a history of the United States space program itself and ends with the Challenger accident. The book follows the changes in NASA from its extremely focussed effort to put a US astronaut on the moon, to the changes induced by the reduced funding of NASA after the first successes of the Apollo program, to a changed NASA implementing the space shuttle program.

The author believes that the reader should "find in the Challenger story evidence to support the view that right now – at a time when the systems are threatening to set their own agendas and go their own way, without any apparent chance for human intervention and control – there has never been a greater need for individuals, within these systems, possessed of civil courage, reliable judgement, and personal integrity."

Detailed Synopsis

The US space program began within the military after World War II with captured German material and scientists from the German space program. During the Eisenhower Administration in the latter part of the 1950’s, the creation of a civilian space program became a priority for President Eisenhower as a part of his vain campaign to reduce the influence of the military industrial complex within the United States.

The Soviet Union launch of Sputnik followed by a series of further successes by the Soviet space program accompanied by several failures of the US program, including a spectacular televised launch pad explosion, pushed President Kennedy into the pledge to put a US astronaut on the Moon by the end of the decade.

NASA through an extremely focussed effort envied by many companies in the private sector put a US astronaut on the moon in 1969 with the world following every launch. But once the moon landing was achieved, NASA no longer had a goal. Others followed the first landing but the excitement of the Apollo program waned and soon NASA was faced with budget cuts and a reduction in the number of Apollo launches. The American voter was not willing to spend huge sums of money to transport a few pounds of rocks from the lunar surface back to Earth.

During the 1970’s NASA no longer had a goal. As the Apollo program was cut back, NASA lobbied the United States Congress for funding of several new programs. Congress agreed to fund the space shuttle program to provide a cost effective mechanism for transportation of payloads into Earth orbit with its obvious military as well as civilian applications.

The shuttle program budget presented to Congress was an optimistic one soon exceeded. The actual procurement process due to the size of contracts being let was incorporated into the standard congressional district dole ensuring that supplier capability took a backseat to supplier location. The executive level within NASA saw changes as well. Executives with a technical orientation left replaced by executives without an engineering background. Decisions moved from technical cost/benefit to political cost/benefit analysis.

The shuttle program itself was under enormous pressure from Congress to be successful. Commercial pressures from competing orbital insertion providers such as the Ariane expendable booster caused shuttle payload prices to be quoted substantially below cost. NASA which had originally counted on hundreds of launches found itself saddled with an expensive machine and support apparatus that could barely manage tens of launches.

No Downlink describes some of the efforts that NASA expended to keep costs down. One such tactic was reduction of spare parts inventories to below what was needed to keep all of the shuttles operational simultaneously. Engineers and maintenance people pulled routine overtime in order to reduce headcount resulting in fatigue affecting employees’ judgement and ability to perform quality work.

NASA management refused to see these changes as being dangerous to the organization’s ability to perform its mission. During the Rogers Commission interviews after the Challenger accident, NASA management was remarkably dense in its refusal to recognize its own part in the accident.

The mandate of the Rogers Commission investigation itself was to document the technical cause of the explosion and suggest procedural changes. It is only due to the insistence of the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the panel, that the commission’s report went into anything other than the technical details of seals and solid rocket boosters.

What struck me were similarities between the NASA of the space shuttle and the General Motors of the Roger Smith tenure as Chairman. There were the same competing fiefdoms, the same lack of concern for the impact of decisions on the organization, and the same lack of concern whether management’s understanding of the organization’s status reflected reality or not.

GM’s goal was to make cosmetic changes to the tunes of billions of dollars without changing the fundamental managerial problems within GM. GM’s needs for new products and new business and manufacturing processes were neglected in order to mount an impressive but useless campaign in factory automation and diversification. In the NASA of the space shuttle, NASA’s goal was no longer to be the payload provider of choice. It was instead to appear to be the payload provider of choice..