![]() The NASA managers challenged this and after a 30 minute offline caucus, Morton Thiokol's senior management overruled their engineers decision and gave the launch the go ahead. During the meeting, Morton Thiokol's engineers issued a recommendation "not to launch below 53F", the previous lowest temperature of a launch ( STS-51C, a year earlier). Morton Thiokol called a meeting the night before the launch to raise concerns over the forecast temperature in regards to the O-Rings. The report also strongly criticized the decision making process that led to the launch of Challenger, saying that it was seriously flawed. This led the Rogers Commission to conclude that the Challenger disaster was "an accident rooted in history". The Commission found that as early as 1977, NASA managers had not only known about the flawed O-ring, but that it had the potential for catastrophe. Most salient was the failure of both NASA and its contractor, Morton Thiokol, to respond adequately to the design flaw. More broadly, the report also determined the contributing causes of the accident. The failure of the O-rings was attributed to a design flaw, as their performance could be too easily compromised by factors including the low temperature on the day of launch. The commission found that the immediate cause of the Challenger accident was a failure in the O-rings sealing the aft field joint on the right solid rocket booster, causing pressurized hot gases and eventually flame to "blow by" the O-ring and contact the adjacent external tank, causing structural failure. The Space Shuttle solid rocket booster field joint assembly (from the Rogers Commission report) Keel, Jr., executive director of the commission Yeager, retired Air Force general and the first person to break the sound barrier in level flight Wheelon, physicist and developer of Central Intelligence Agency's aerial surveillance program Walker, Jr, solar physicist and Stanford University professor Sutter, Boeing Senior Vice President and Engineering Program Director on the Boeing 747 aircraft Rummel, Trans World Airlines executive and aviation consultant to NASA Ride, American engineer, astrophysicist and first female American astronaut in space, flew on Challenger as part of missions STS-7 and STS-41-G Kutyna, Air Force general with experience in ICBMs and Shuttle management ![]() Hotz, Editor, Aviation Week And Space Technology Feynman, theoretical physicist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics ![]() Covert, aeronautics expert and former Chief Scientist of the U.S. ![]() David Campion Acheson, diplomat and son of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.Neil Armstrong (Vice Chairman), retired astronaut and first human to walk on the Moon ( Apollo 11).Rogers, chairman and former United States Secretary of State (under Richard Nixon) and United States Attorney General (under Dwight Eisenhower) Members of the Rogers Commission arrive at Kennedy Space Center. ![]()
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