The Challenger Disaster and Its Lessons for Today

Although the 1986 space shuttle launches had become routine, more Americans than usual tuned in that morning because the crew included the first civilian astronaut, “space teacher” Christa McAuliffe. Ronald Reagan was the first government official to offer the teacher-in-space program two years earlier, although the idea of ​​including a civilian in the shuttle program had been contemplated at NASA for several years. McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 candidates. Her death made Challenger’s destruction even more emotional and tragic.

The first question that horrible day was how the government, and especially President Reagan, would respond. Reagan postponed his State of the Union address, scheduled for that night, and wanted to deliver a speech to the nation that would especially reach the hundreds of thousands of school children who had seen the disaster live on TV in their classrooms. .

Unlike President Richard Nixon, who had a pre-written speech ready in case the first Apollo moon mission failed in 1969, Reagan’s personnel had to improvise from scratch, with no time for the usual presidential statement process. Reagan’s comments fell to his speechwriter Peggy Noonan. The result was a 650-word speech that took Reagan less than five minutes to complete, but still tops his many memorable speeches. Reagan’s reputation as ‘the great communicator’ seldom made its mark on that day.

The closing line, taken from a famous World War II poem by Canadian Air Force pilot John Gillespie Magee, is the most remembered part of Reagan’s speech: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning. as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the gruff bands of the earth” to “touch the face of God.” But in the middle of the speech, in which Reagan addressed America’s schoolchildren about the hard lesson of human tragedy, is where the important message is conveyed: Risk is part of the human story. “The future is not for the faint of heart; it belongs to the brave. Reagan spent the next few days talking to the families of all the lost astronauts, all telling him that our space program must continue.

From today’s polarized politics, many Americans look back with meshed nostalgia on the Reagan years and marvel at moments of national unity, wondering if we can ever match them again. But the partisan division was just as intense then. That same morning, House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass) had exchanged bitter words with Reagan about the government’s budget. Still, there was a difference, almost hard to imagine today. O’Neill was later able to write that the Challenger’s speech was “Reagan at its best; It was a difficult day for all Americans, and Ronald Reagan spoke of our highest ideals.”

Another difference between then and today was the absence of social media to reinforce misinformation and swear words. There were plenty of rumors and false claims back then anyway, such as that the White House had pressured NASA to launch that morning to coincide with Reagan’s planned State of the Union address. But the slower news cycle and communication technology limited the spread of such claims. You shudder when you consider how the false stories would have spread through Twitter and Facebook.

The likely causes of the Challenger explosion – faulty O-rings on the booster missiles – were publicly discussed within hours, as was the case with the second space shuttle disaster, the Columbia explosion on return in 2003 due to damaged heat shield floor tiles. Despite criticism that NASA was less than forthcoming in the immediate aftermath of Challenger, there was no cover up, suppression of information, or media censorship. The contrast to how the Soviet Union for years announced their launches from space only after they took place (let alone their silence on Chernobyl a few months after Challenger), or how China has covered up repeated disease outbreaks over the past two decades , is a telling lesson in the difference between open and closed societies.

The aftermath of Challenger, who saw a special commission set up to investigate the causes of the disaster through public hearings, points to one of the ongoing challenges of modern complexity. The Rogers Commission, which published its report in June, was harsh in its assessment of NASA’s failure to assess risk and launch decision-making.

But the myopia and path-dependent practices of bureaucratic organizations are now a familiar story. Examples include the failure of the intelligence community to “connect the dots” before the 9/11 attacks and the failure of financial regulators to see the imbalances build up until the 2008 financial crash.

The usual response to such lapses is to add more layers of bureaucratic judgment and decision making. But that’s a double-edged sword. Not only does it reduce risk, but it can also lead to rising budgets, rigidity, groupthink, and less creativity and innovation. Just compare the cost and progress of NASA’s current rocket and spacecraft designs with recent private sector space efforts.

To be honest, the list of things that can go wrong during space flights is, frankly, long, while the list of things that went wrong during the lifetime of our space program is – blissfully – short. Undoubtedly, there were many other potential problems that demanded attention the morning of the Challenger’s fateful launch. Before Challenger, the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in 1967 was the only other fatal accident, although there were several close calls, the most famous being Apollo 13 in 1970.

Our space program has learned from each of these incidents, leading to significant changes with cumulative benefits. One reason the original lunar project was able to meet President John F. Kennedy’s ambitious goal was that its timeline was so short: NASA had no time to bureaucratize. Despite our technological advancements, the return to the moon will likely take twice as long today, at multiples of the cost (adjusted for inflation), as the original Apollo landing.

Finding the right way to manage risk is an endless argument. Twenty-one years after Challenger, a teacher named Barbara Morgan finally entered orbit as originally intended. She had been McAuliffe’s backup in 1986 and stayed with the program during NASA’s long regrouping. It was exactly what Reagan and the families of the Challenger astronauts had urged the land to do.

—Steven F. Hayward is the author of “The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989” and visiting lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law.