The SURPRISING Cause of the Challenger Disaster Changed Engineering Forever

O ring seals were not the correct type of seals for that application. O rings are designed for close fitting components like pistons in hydraulic cylinders. A "lip" seal would have been the correct type as they are designed for loose fits (and the joint rotation). The company that provided the seals makes both kinds (and many others). I'm a mechanical engineer.

Bad decision making it's made every day in all fields, influenced by many factors, and the worst one of the bunch is the human factor!...... makes you wonder how we got to where we are today.

I was a waiter at a Jewish sorority that day. It was on one of the biggest tube TV’s of the day… Fifty plus young women having nervous breakdowns simultaneously. There was not enough love to go around at that house that day.

We were watching it live in kindergarten class but quickly got turned off after the explosion. Was a somber day that is etched into my memory.

If they had used Celsius, the temperature would have been far lower /sarcasm/

A poem: In a minute. Mankind's most excellent toy. Revealed to all its fury. The toymakers' hubris called for sacrifice of innocents. We forgot Love. Dear Lord, forgive our worship of false gods.

This is one major reason that I prefer Blue Origin over SpaceX. Blue Origin has taken its time on its projects to get things right the first time, whereas SpaceX has had a reckless approach to their development. That being said, Falcon 9, after the initial development and all the tests and many RUDs, has turned out to be reliable and a great workhorse. I really questioned the concept of Starship though. It's booster seems to be decent, But the upper half Starship itself, I think is a poor idea and really should be rethought.

Criminal negligence 😢😢😢

I was in high school and was dumbfounded when we heard what had happened to the Challenger and couldn't believe it. Years later, I was just as amazed and dumbfounded when I was deployed with the United States Army and heard the news that the Columbia was lost. While not the same, I still feel the loss. Stricken birds who couldn't save their crew.

And nobody went to prison.

universal law: you can do things well, you can do things quickly, you can do things cheaply. choose any two!

any proof for this vivid claim ?

Always listen to engineers, not managers.

This should be taught in business classes if not taught now.

This whole thing reminds me of how governments are ignoring climate change warnings because of money

Wow that’s wild. Hard lesson learned for sure

Big Bird couldn't fit so NASA blew up a teacher :(

A very important point you failed to address. 1/128/86 was the scheduled SOU address to Congress by Reagan. The WH had put great pressure on NASA to have a successful launch to brag about. See Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age Hardcover – February 1, 2007
by Richard C. Cook (Author)

Additional pressure was put on by the White House as Reagan was going to do the State of the Union speech and use Challenger's launch as a success point. The series 'Challenger: The Final Flight' does a great job of explaining all of the mistakes and ignoring the engineers.

“Hopefully the companies will listen…”

Uh. I’m pretty sure the verdict is in on that. But it’s a nice thought. Growth companies are under a pressure that will never be constrained by safety. They don’t make an O ring that strong. 😊👍👍

Answer: NASA didn't learn its lesson. Proof? Columbia accident.

It is interesting how much is pushed on the company when NASA was pusing for an excuse to go aheadd. If they were just looking for the contractor's engineers to stop pushing back why are we blaming the contractor rather than the NASA administrators who were not taking No for an answer?

still using old tech, Von Braun's design just tweaked the hell out of it.

I take humbrage with the title of this video:: This has changed Engineering. NOT AT ALL. The engineering was always correct! The fault was found early by engineers. And don't drag Space X into this. It is an engineering company run by engineers. Just like Boeing used to be an engineering company run by engineers. The correct title should have been: This has changed managing forever! But then the Harvard grads take over...

We are doomed to repeat. Humans have track record of ignoring history.

I was on the road the day the Challenger exploded and witnessed the entire event. Never having seen a space launch i thought that the external rockets were separating. My boss, who had seen a few launches began to get nervous and said that something seems not right. And then everything went crazy. The announcer on the radio began to panic. Realizing that the humans on board that craft would never make it i got sick to my stomach. Why the heck did the managers not listen to the engineers? They tried to save a buck and instead ended up spending billions and ending the lives of seven good people.

Yep, I remember many thousands of pagers going off, at many companies in the supply chain I imagine, in case we needed to track the components we supplied.

You should do a video on the Kansas City Missouri Hyatt Regency walkway collapse.

i miss the shuttles......it sad they couldnt update them all to accommodate the new missions....itd be better than the SLS we DONT have now.

A classic example of management not valuing engineering. As a retired engineer, I know that it’s widespread in the industry.

Nuclear power plant have to work as an economic entity, which makes me deeply distrust them.
There is this story: Japanese workers had to carry a radiating solution in buckets, because it was cheeper than building a conduit.

The putty covered for the defective design. Then the leak check procedure was changed with the gas at higher pressure, creating cracks in the putty.

as a mechanic for 30 yrs, I know engineers make bad designs sometimes and build failures into parts but here is a case where the engineers where over-ruled by the bean counters and it ended in disaster....the numbers didn't add up for the science guys and the number guys were going to lose money and face...how did that work out for them....we see a lot of the same decisions today when it comes to medicine and science and how politics is used to make life changing decisions

That explosion was the result of hierarchy over merit. Hierarchy is all about power and favors, how you are perceived is vital to your position. Narcissists and psychopaths can only form hierarchical networks due to their natural social proclivities. Merit based organizations are all about reality. By merit, it is meant that the person most likely to ensure mission success is put into the position, and it is understood that the mission is about the stated results. Thus if the mission is to put astronauts safely into orbit and then return them safely to the ground, in a merit based organization, all parameters of success are carefully determined and measured. The reason governments and large corporations have these kinds of failures is simply due to the type of person that is attracted to the positions given authority over the mission.

Thank you. Excellent coverage. I was just beginning work on rockets when this happened. I have been involved with rockets for the succeeding 40 years. That is a lesson we learned written in blood. I can tell you that it was taken to heart within DOD and NASA. That is why I was shocked when Boeing lost its way. Too many involved in space today are focused on “how can it go wrong” and protecting against that, not “how can it go right.”

There was a similar problematic culture that led to the Columbia disaster.
Engineers knew the foam insulation on the fuel tank was delicate and foam strikes on the orbiter had been observed during previous shuttle launches.
But again the risk was normalised and not evaluated properly

Pure profit driven Private Launch businesses... What could possibly go wrong?

Long one, but please read. Tge shuttle was a death trap right from the original al design. It wasn't meant to be attached on the side of the rocket. But due to it's size, there was no choice. So both disasters could have been avoided if the ship was on top, as it was originally designed. Did NASA learn something from the challenger disaster, no! When Columbia got hit by a chunk of foam, an engineer warned management. But yet it was ignored. Just like the Challenger disaster. The best decision was to scrap the shuttle program. And as you have noticed. There is no longer any manned vessel attached on the side of the rocket.

The background music is so distracting when trying to listen to what you're saying

The story I remember back then, a person went upto feimen office and dropped off an O ring on his desk and said to him before leaving "what happens when it gets cold?".

Great video Ricky,

The biggest problem that day was management changing from the previous NASA attitude of "prove it is good to GO" (the reason they say "GO for launch") to "prove it isn't good to go". Small syntax, big difference. There was absolutely no data on launch performance that cold.

Ice on the chain link fence in West Palm that morning. That's a bit further south of Cocoa Beach. Saw it with my own eyes, ran inside to hear the bad news. Tragic in the extreme.

Ronald McNair, the smartest man in the world, lost his life. A lost to the world.

A bit disappointed that there's nothing new here except the correlation to the new private enterprises. And no mention of the one thing which might actually bring an end to the basic problem- an end to the legal concept corporate immunity. The law grants rights to corporations, holding that they are essentially the same as an individual, but that somehow becomes different when it's time to assign fault when something goes wrong. Very rarely in the US is there a personal holding of blame to people in that corporation for errors. Yet if you or I as individuals do the exact same thing we get to eat jail food for awhile.

In the Challenger investigation there were some individuals identified who largely bore the blame for this, and while they may have suffered some personal loss of prestige, they knew from the start of their career that they'd never go to jail for any errors they made.Had the management at NASA and Thiokol known that they would likely go to jail for making the bad decisions which led to this disaster,it's almost certain that they would have decided to follow the safe course throughout. While those people aren't guilty of murder they are most certainly guilty of some level of manslaughter times 7. Same as the 'beancounters' who approved the Ford Pinto fuel tank as it was originally produced. Ir the GM management who let the Corvair out without a sway bar, or Oceangate's Titan sub implosion. The list of excused negligence because of our legal system's failure needs to be corrected or things like this will continue forever. Nobody should be excused from personal responsibility for all of their actions.Nobody.

They were killed by bureaucracy!

Not sure what "changed forever". NASA launched that shuttle outside of its design envelope (too cold). They had already decided to fly unless people could prove it was unsafe, rather only deciding to fly when people could justify that it was safe. That has wrong then and is still wrong today.

And this is why business-types and management-types should never be in charge of ultimate decision-making. I see it all the time in my work of product liability, *every* company out there has what we’ve come to call as “THE email.” The email where the business types discuss the “Business Case” for a recall of a product, Aka is it cheaper to knowingly let people die and pay the lawyers and/or the case settlements, or conduct a recall of a product.