The proximate cause and the ultimate causes of the Shuttle Challenger disaster

When complaining about the loss of Challenger and Columbia one day, a coworker said, "Well, you know, they are the most complicated craft ever flown." I blinked twice and said, "But what caused the disasters had nothing to do with complications of systems engineering. What caused the disasters were 1. frozen rubber, and 2. falling ice."

The proximate cause of the loss of Challenger and her crew: Low temperatures caused an O-ring to stiffen so that it could not move and seat properly. Hot gases leaked out of the joint and ignited the external fuel tank.

But what were the ultimate causes?

Start with redesigns by everyone putting in their two cents.

Where was the O-ring? In a joint in the right solid rocket booster.

Couldn't the booster have been made in one piece so that there would have been no joint to begin with and therefore no O-ring? Yes.

Why wasn't it? Was it not possible to produce it in one piece? Yes, it was possible to produce the booster in one piece. A manufacturer near Florida could have made it in one piece and shipped it by rail to the launch site. That manufacturer was not given the contract.

Who was given the contract? A manufacturer in Utah.

Why? Because it was their turn to receive pork from Washington.

So why didn't the Utah manufacturer make the booster in one piece? Because the rail lines from Utah to Florida couldn't handle the shipment of the booster in one piece. So, they had to make it in pieces, so there was a joint, so there was an O-ring, so there was failure of the O-ring, and so Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik (who were conscious for two minutes from the time the crew cabin detached from the Shuttle until it hit the water, because emergency oxygen packs had been manually activated) were lost due to politicians feeding pork to their constituents and interfering with the engineering many years before 11:39 AM January 28, 1986.


For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a nail.

Some conspiracy theorists think Washington does so many strange things because it is secretly run by aliens from another planet. The real reason it is so strange: money.