Space Shuttle Challenger Case Study

The sequence of events that led to the bad decision on the part of NASA’s base lie in economic, political, and scheduling backlog pressures. Competition from the European Space Agency put NASA under pressure to come up with a space mission, which would hopefully shed light on the ability of NASA to plan commercialized space departures. NASA also had to prove that its program should continue to be funded; another unforeseen pressure pushing NASA to schedule its record number of Space exploration trips that year than in any other year. Also, the space shuttle mission scheduled before the Challenger had been delayed over and over; a record number of times. The next mission after the Challenger involved a probe being sent into space in order to evaluate Haley’s Comet. If the Challenger and subsequently the next mission were not executed in a timely manner then a doppelganger probe from Russia would beat the U.S. probe to Haley’s Comet. Pressure to launch the challenger, as soon as possible, could have also come from President Reagan’s upcoming State of the Union Address in which he would be mentioning the first teacher astronaut in space. All of these beforehand mentioned pressures led to bad engineering design, and timing, which ultimately led to the failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger mission. In order to evaluate and correct
mistakes; it should begin with the mistakes of succumbing to deadline pressures. The shuttle had solid rocket boosters, which were required to get the shuttle out of Earth’s atmosphere and intense gravitational pull. Once the solid rocket boosters are ignited then they cannot be stopped or even controlled, ill-design of the solid rocket boosters could have contributed to the explosion that occurred that day. The principle point of the O-rings is to prevent hot combustion gasses from escaping from the inside of the motor. Improper design and sealing of the O-rings most definitely led to the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Redesigning the O-ring system such as adding the proper amount of the heat-resistant putty, should have led to a safer Space Shuttle launch. The firm that designed the O-rings and solid rocket boosters, Morton-Thiokol, were asked if their designs would hold up in the cold weather, to which they conceded it would have problems.
The principle two engineers on the case Robert Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly objected to using the solid rocket boosters as is, and prompted for a redesign. Despite their complaints Ebeling and Boisjoly could not get upper level management to agree with a redesign effort. Days before Jan 28, 1986 upper level management conducted good engineering practices then they would have allowed another redesign effort. Another redesign effort or postponing to
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