The challenging disaster and its lessons for today

Although space shuttle launches became routine in 1986, more Americans than usual were tuned in that morning because the crew included the first civilian astronaut, “space teacher” Christa McAuliffe. Ronald Reagan was the first public official to proclaim the space teacher program two years earlier, although the idea of ​​including a civilian in the space shuttle program had been considered at NASA for several years. McAuliffe was chosen from more than 11,000 candidates. His death made Challenger’s destruction even more emotionally painful and tragic.

The first question on that terrible day was how the government, and especially President Reagan, would respond. Reagan postponed his State of the Union address, which was scheduled for that evening, and began giving a speech to the nation that would especially reach the hundreds of thousands of students who watched the disaster on live TV in their classrooms.

Unlike President Richard Nixon, who had a pre-written speech ready in case the first Apollo lunar mission failed in 1969, Reagan’s team had to improvise from scratch, with no time for the usual presidential declaration process. The task of writing Reagan’s comments fell to his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. The result was a 650-word speech that took Reagan less than five minutes to deliver, but was close to the top of his many memorable speeches. Reagan’s reputation as “the great communicator” rarely found its fullest mark than it did that day.

The final sentence, derived from a famous WWII poem by Canadian Air Force pilot John Gillespie Magee, is the most remembered part of Reagan’s speech: “We will never forget them, not the last time we saw them, this morning , as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the chains of the earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’ ”. But in the middle of the speech, Reagan addressed the students of America about the harsh lesson of human tragedy, it is where the important message is conveyed: risk is part of human history. “The future does not belong to the fearful; belongs to the brave. ”Reagan spoke to the families of all astronauts lost in the days that followed; everyone told him that our space program must continue.

Based on today’s polarized politics, many Americans look back to the Reagan years with nebulous nostalgia and marvel at the moments of national unity, wondering if we can match it again. But party divisions were so intense. That same morning, mayor Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass) exchanged bitter words with Reagan about the government budget. Still, there was a difference, almost difficult to imagine today. O’Neill was able to write later that Challenger’s speech was “Reagan at his best; It was a difficult day for all Americans, and Ronald Reagan spoke about our highest ideals. “

Another difference between that time and today was the absence of social media to amplify misinformation and injuries. In any case, there were rumors and false claims in abundance at the time, such as that the White House pressured NASA to launch that morning to coincide with Reagan’s State of the Union speech. But the slower news cycle and communication technology have limited the spread of such claims. We shudder to think how the fake stories would have spread with Twitter and Facebook.

The probable causes of the Challenger explosion – defective O-rings in the reinforcement rockets – were being discussed publicly within hours, as was also the case in the space shuttle’s second disaster, the Columbia explosion on re-entry in 2003 due to damage tiles with thermal protection. Despite criticism that NASA was not available shortly after Challenger, there was no cover-up, information suppression or media censorship. The contrast to how the Soviet Union for many years never announced its space launches before they occurred (let alone the silence on Chernobyl a few months after the Challenger), or how China has repeatedly covered up disease outbreaks in the past two decades, it is a revealing lesson about the difference between open and closed societies.

The aftermath of Challenger, which saw a special commission created to investigate the causes of the disaster through public hearings, points to one of the continuing challenges presented by modern complexity. The Rogers Commission, which released its report that June, was tough in its assessment of NASA’s negligence in risk assessment and launch decision-making.

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

The usual response to such lapses is to add more layers of bureaucratic review and decision making. But this is a double-edged sword. While reducing risks, it can also lead to high budgets, rigidity, group thinking and less creativity and innovation. Just compare the cost and progress of NASA’s current rocket and spacecraft projects with recent private sector space efforts.

To be fair to NASA, the list of things that can go wrong with space flight is long, while the list of things that went wrong during the life of our space program is – fortunately – short. Undoubtedly, there were many other potential problems that required attention the morning of the Challenger’s fateful launch. Before the Challenger, the fire on the Apollo 1 launch pad in 1967 was the only other case of a fatal accident, although there were several accidents, the most famous being Apollo 13 in 1970.

Our space program has learned from each of these incidents, leading to major changes with cumulative benefits. One reason the moon’s initial design was able to achieve President John F. Kennedy’s ambitious goal was that the timeline was so short – NASA didn’t have time to bureaucratize itself. Despite our advances in technology, returning to the Moon today is likely to take twice as long, at many multiples of the cost (adjusted for inflation), than the landing of the original Apollo.

Finding the right way to manage risk is an endless discussion. Twenty-one years after Challenger, a teacher named Barbara Morgan finally went into orbit as originally planned. It had been McAuliffe’s reserve in 1986 and maintained the program during NASA’s long regroupment. It was exactly what Reagan and the families of Challenger astronauts recommended that the country do.

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