You're Wrong About - The Challenger Disaster

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

It wasn’t an accident. Mike tells Sarah how the infamous space shuttle disaster came to be seen as a white-collar crime. Digressions include the Donner Party, George Lucas and “Jurassic Park.” Both co-hosts are audibly recovering from colds. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

And why is it that we're sending people into space like gangbusters during this period anyway? Like, what's the justification for that? I realize I sound like I'm 80. 🎵 Welcome to You're Wrong About. The show where the villain is always capitalism. Oh. Yes.

I saw the fugitive since we last recorded. Okay. And all I want to do is chase capitalism down to some sort of irrigation thing outside Chicago. And capitalism will say, But wait, I can still be a viable system for organizing society. And I'll say, I don't care. And then capitalism will jump.

Is that our longest tagline ever? Oh, that has to be by like a factor of a million. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. And I'm a writer in residence at the Black Mountain Institute. Though right now I'm in my childhood bedroom closet because I am home for the holidays. And today we're talking about the Challenger Explosion.

Yes. Which I'm very excited to learn about. Well, I feel weird about it because everyone else, it seems like has these memories as a kid of watching the Challenger Explosion. But I was born in 1982, so I was only four when it happened. So it has no big meaning for me. It's not something that I watched happen or was really aware of. But anyone who is just a couple years older than me,

it's this huge touchstone moment. And I wasn't born because I was born in 1988. And so it's something that like a whole generation of people experienced, but that had no permanence in American memory. Because after that, it's not as if it became this part of our curriculum where we were like, and now the Challenger disaster. Like I chose it as something to study in like a choose your favorite NASA mission in science class thing. And I chose Challenger and characteristically found a way to only read a very small portion

of the book that I was supposed to read to learn about it. So Kristen McAuliffe was like the only thing I learned about. Oh, yeah. But even based on that approach, I remember finding it like very surreal and sad. So yeah, what do you remember about the actual Challenger Explosion? Do you want to walk me through the actual events? So they were like, let's have a non-astronaut come into space because I don't know, in the same way that the Donner party actually attempted to cross the Sierras after pioneers

have been doing that for quite some time without any incident and had just gotten real brazen about it. They were like, hey, we've been explicitly got a few years without some sort of terrible disaster. I think we can just be totally calm about this forever. And so they chose her as a teacher to go into space. And then they had like there was a little rubber o-ring somewhere somewhere on the spaceship. Some like tiny little component that because it was really cold that morning cracked. And then there was a whole systems failure. I mean, I've seen the footage.

It's hard to tell exactly what happens. Yeah, it's awful. Because I mean, it just disintegrated, right? Yeah. It just seems like something that if I had been shown that as a child and in the context that children were shown it, they would just be like, oh, fuck. Like maybe that's what caused millennials, actually, just being like, wow. So we really got overconfident, didn't we?

I mean, one of the reasons why it has this oversized place in people's imagination at the time and then kind of disappears is mostly because as usual, we learned the wrong lessons from it. It was seen at the time as like an accident or something that's caused by, you know, evil middle managers. But actually, the way that I found this and the way that I realized how wrong I was about the Challenger explosion is I'm working on a top secret article that is putting me in proximity to the issue of state corporate crimes, things where the government is essentially complicit in white collar crimes. And it comes up a lot in this literature that academics are like, well, as everyone knows, the Challenger explosion is the perfect example of white collar crime.

What? And I was like, hang on a second. Rosebud is who exactly? But that's actually true. And we will get into why that is the case and how this got reinterpreted through time. But first of all, that was actually a very lucid recollection, Sarah. And that's your memory of this is way better than mine was two weeks ago. Well, it's my memory of my research paper in seventh grade.

And I think because I troubled myself with like so little actual research material, I tended to really retain it. What you're getting at is one of the first major myths of this, which is that everybody watched it live on TV. Oh, they didn't. Which very few people actually did. None of the networks actually carried it. Really?

I mean, first of all, this is at 11 30 in the morning on a weekday. So very few people are in a position to be watching TV at that hour. Another thing is, and we've completely forgotten this now. This was the 10th shuttle launch in a year. What? Yeah, there's like a one shuttle launch a month at this point before the explosion. No one is seeing this as particularly noteworthy. The only noteworthy thing about it actually is the fact that it's the first time a

space shuttle mission has ever had a civilian on it. And so the kids that are watching it in school are sort of the only people that are watching it. Right. So it was like very important news to kids the whole time that adults were never paying attention. Yeah. And it's one of the reasons why it is this indelible moment because lots of schools got this fee. Lots of schools took a break to watch this because Krista McAuliffe.

Can we just say from the beginning to like, don't you think she just has the face of a nice lady? Oh my God, I mean, she's like 40. And so like by the time you're 40, you've developed the face that like shows the expressions you've been making that whole time and like she has nice lady face. Oh my God. And I know I put off all of the research about Krista McAuliffe for basically the whole two weeks that I was researching this because I knew that it was going to make me fucking cry.

And I knew that talking about her at all in any length of time is going to make me cry and like I'm going to completely break down. So last week I was at the gym and I was waiting for my boyfriend to come meet me there and I had like an hour to kill and I was like, finally fuck it. I'm just going to read up about Krista McAuliffe. And then by the time my boyfriend arrived, I was just like this wet mess. My laptop reading about and it's true. There was they announced this thing called the teacher in space program in 1984.

They got 11,000 applications, one of which of course was Krista McAuliffe. They brought in all the shortlist of various teachers around the country and basically everybody says that the main reason why Krista McAuliffe was chosen was because she's just like a really nice lady. Like she just had this personality that just made you like her instantly. And she also did a bunch of lessons around the way that ordinary people have changed history. So her whole thing was she was going to keep a journal the whole time she was up in space, kind of like the pioneer women.

She wanted to come back with this day to day log. Oh, that's so cool. She was going to do two lessons from space. This is the one that like I'm going to try to say this without crying. She had two kids. She had a nine year old son and a five year old daughter and she brought a stuffed frog named Fleagle with her and she was going to wave it in front of the camera to show it to her son Scott. Oh, boy.

I mean, yeah, she really does sound like a genuinely special person. I feel like I also just I hold I get way sadder about NASA accidentally killing someone than like, I don't know, a deranged pit bull. Right. Because this thing where we're just like, you know, we're NASA was like, we will take you into space and we will help you teach the world. And I hope that in the story there was some way that they could have done better than that. Well, this episode might cure you of your idealism about NASA.

That might be your main takeaway from this. Is NASA the one federal agency that I still want to believe in and then I'm going to have to give up today? Like, all right. It's really hard to decide like how to structure this because there's essentially three narratives that form about the reason for the explosion. But the technical details of why the Challenger broke apart are really important. So I'm going to go through what actually happened that morning. So it's January 28th, 1986.

By the way, I'm so excited right now. I feel like I'm Laura Dern and you're one of the Attenborough's. I forget which it's very exciting. Continue. This is slightly the blinding the blind because I am like the least technically proficient person. Like, I need a three man team to hang a photo in my apartment. Like, I'm terrible. And so I've been trying to figure out all of the technical details of why this actually broke.

And what's really interesting is, you know what? Every plane crash, it's like this chain of events, right? It's like the landing gear won't go down and then the computer that was supposed to fix it was down and the pilot was asleep and the light that was supposed to come on didn't come on. I do not actually have general knowledge of how plane crash is generally worked. But like in general, it's a chain of very rare events and they all have to happen at once. Okay. What's really interesting about this is that's not how this is.

This is one thing goes wrong. There was a 0.04 inch mistake and that was enough to destroy the entire mission. Good. So when you think of a space shuttle, there's four components. There's the actual space shuttle, right? The actual like airplane. Then there's the big rocket tank. It's attached to the space shuttle, right?

The big thing in the middle. And then there's on the side, there's the two little Roman candles attached to the side. Are you with me so far? Yes. Thank you for checking though. I appreciate that. So the way that it works is, or the way that it's supposed to work, the giant thing, the giant column in the middle is the main fuel tank that gets you out of Earth's atmosphere.

And the rocket boosters on the side, the little Roman candles on the side, those only burn for two minutes. Wow. Because that's the hardest. There's the most air pressure. Because you're escaping gravity's surly embrace or whatever. Yeah. That's the hardest two minutes.

So you need these two extra rocket boosters to get you up to the place where the giant middle booster can take you from there. So it's all very strategic. Like you're using every ounce of power you can possibly get. It's still like you're tricking gravity into letting you go. Yeah. What's interesting is of course, you know, these little rocket boosters on the side of the rocket look like, you know, little bottle rockets that are duct taped to the entire apparatus,

but they're actually 150 feet tall. Good Lord. The way that they work is they're actually made of four different segments because they are built in Utah and then they're trucked to Florida for the launch. So you have to break them into four different segments to get them on trucks. Wow. And then once they're in Florida, they are shoved together and then they're ready for the launch. And so this metaphor is wrong in a million ways,

but it's the closest thing that I can come to to understanding how this O-ring stuff works that basically you've got these four segments of the rocket booster. And it's a little bit like if you cut the bottom and the top off of a bunch of water bottles and then you sort of shove them together, right? So they're kind of overlapping. That's essentially how the rocket booster is put together. It's these overlapping tubes that go kind of around each other with this area of overlap. Okay.

As you can imagine, if you just tried to do this with a bunch of water bottles and then you tried to fill it with water, the water would leak out all of those joins, right? So what the rocket scientists come up with is what if we put a rubber band around the inside water bottle? And that way when we push the outside water bottle over it, it's going to create this little rubber seal that's going to keep water from pouring it. So it's just an airtight seal. It's something that has to create a complete seal. Yes.

Okay. And this sounds like I'm exaggerating this, but this is actually true. So the way that they have these overlapping segments over each other is they put an O-ring, which is the rubber band. They put that around the inside seal and then essentially they put silly putty around it. So the way that these segments are put together, and then, you know, there's clamps and there's nails and there's other things, but the most important thing for creating an airtight seal is this rubber band

and they put a bunch of very advanced silly putty around it. And so when you think of an O-ring, you think of something that's like small, you know, it's a couple inches in diameter. The actual O-rings are 38 feet around. So it's 38 feet circumference, but they're only a quarter of an inch thick. Wow. So that is what is holding together these four segments. Okay.

So that's what it is. It's a 38 foot rubber band. Yes. Wow. I'm wildly oversimplifying things, but as far as the seal between the two segments, that's the most important thing is the silly putty and the rubber band. Yeah. So what happens is it's January, right?

And Florida has a once in a lifetime cold snap. Classic Florida. Classic Florida. The night before the launch, the temperature gets to eight degrees Fahrenheit. Good Lord. Which I didn't even know could happen in Florida. What we know now is that these O-rings, these rubber bands, when they get cold, they lose structural integrity.

They don't work as well. They just never tested them for that because they're like, well, we're in Florida. This will never happen. What are the odds? Yeah. I mean, the big thing is when you're talking about going to space, the thing you think you need to deal with is heat, right?

You're burning all this fuel. And so what you think you need to be able to withstand is like 10,000 degrees temperature. I mean, that's what everybody is working toward. We need to make sure that it withstands heat. But what nobody considers is that when something gets cold, it's not as good at withstanding heat. So that's a little bit confusing. But once something gets cold, it then breaks up when it's exposed to heat

as opposed to flexing. Right, because it gets brittle and it loses elasticity and it loses its like structural integrity. Yes. Another thing that's really important about this is that this whole thing with the overlapping water bottles and the rubber band and the silly putty, this is actually a standard thing. They use it in missiles.

They use it in cars. Like if you break open a car, you'll find a million O-rings. This is a known solution to these types of problems. But what's important about the other O-rings that you find in cars and all these other things is that they don't flex. They're usually solid objects. Whereas in a solid rocket booster, because the pressures inside the rocket are so insane, the joins between these segments are actually flexing a little.

Kind of like if you squeeze one of the water bottles, the other ones would flex a little bit. That's happening and O-rings are not designed for that. There's no other application of O-rings that deals with flexing and it's rotating a little bit. So the O-ring has to kind of deal with this vibration. Okay. So what happens is it's eight degrees overnight in Florida.

These O-rings get a little bit stiffer overnight. It's kind of crazy. There's icicles on the launch pad the morning of the launch. They've never dealt with conditions this cold before. So there's all these inspection teams that go out to the launch pad. There's photos actually of the gauges that they're using, all the instrument displays that have like this beard of icicles. It looks very abandoned North Pole radio tower type of thing.

But it's actually the middle of this launch. But nobody knows really the effect of the cold on the O-rings at the time. So like, well, that's weird. But then it starts getting warmer as it's daytime. So by the time they launch, it's 36 degrees, which is the coldest launch ever. But at the time, nobody really knows like whatever cold is not the big deal because we're supposed to be dealing with heat. Right.

So the shuttle lifts off at 1138 AM. I mean, one of the sad and scary things about this is that there's no problem for the first 72 seconds of the flight. Nothing looks amiss. There's no problems with the pressure. And then nobody's expecting it. And then the whole thing just breaks apart in the air. So at 73 seconds after launch, the entire thing breaks up.

And there's this really heartbreaking sort of play by play that is in one of the commission reports later that says there were no alarms sounded in the cockpit. The crew apparently had no indication of a problem before the rapid breakup of the space shuttle. The first evidence of an accident came from live video coverage. Radar then began to track multiple objects. So what happens is what we know now is that the space shuttle launches this rocket booster with the cold O-ring, springs a leak at 73 seconds. Like I said, it's only a 0.04 of an inch gap between the two segments.

But that's enough for this jet of rocket fuel to blast out of the booster rocket. And then because there's this jet of fuel blasting out of it, the pressure drops in the rest of the rocket. It loses all of its thrust. And then basically the entire thing breaks apart. So one of the things about solid booster rockets is you can't turn them off. They are like a Roman candle where you light them and they just go off for two minutes. There's no way to control them.

So because pressure drops in one of the solid booster rockets, the right hand booster rocket, it actually falls off the main rocket, like it twists around. And then because of that, the other one falls off too. Yeah. So it's essentially like an imbalance initially. Exactly. It gets pulled out of balance and starts wobbling around. And yeah. And then both rockets essentially get twisted off of this main middle rocket.

You know, the forces are so great to get this giant like million pound object into space. The forces are so great that the minute anything goes a little wrong, the minute the angle changes a little bit, everything just starts spinning around. So a really fucked up thing about the footage. If you watch the footage is the two booster rockets keep going. They both just kind of twist off of the main rocket and they do actually fly around like bottle rockets. These giant 150 foot tall things are just like and just kind of spinning around for another 45 seconds. And another one of the weird myths of this is that there's no explosion.

So it looks like an explosion because basically all of the jet fuel ends up blasting out of one booster rocket. So there's this giant cloud of jet fuel and smoke, but there's no actual boom. There's no explosion. What happens is later on a lot of the TV stations that are showing this footage 10 million times, they add the sound of an explosion in post. What? Yes, because kind of like the movie Gravity, you know, there's no sound and like people couldn't deal with that. So in the trailers for that movie, they add explosion sounds.

Wow. It looks like there should be sound. And so TV producers are like, I mean, it does. But there's that doesn't mean that there is any. She that's the thing. We remember this big. Yes, because we were told there was one. Yeah, I mean, the super tragic thing about this is because there's no explosion, the astronauts are alive for another minute.

Oh my God. I never knew that they're on this upward trajectory. They're going about 20,000 miles an hour upwards. Jesus. The entire craft breaks apart and ends up, you know, spinning around because of the these insane forces. The space shuttle is also twisted off of the main engine and just ends up going on its trajectory like a bullet. It just goes upward for a little bit and then it arcs and then it comes down and it eventually just hits the Atlantic Ocean going 200 miles an hour. Wow.

The closest thing to good news from all of this that you can get is that it's pretty likely because of the forces involved that the crew was unconscious. But it went down for as long as it went up and they were technically alive for all of that time. And they actually recovered their bodies about six months later. I didn't know that they ever recovered bodies from it. Yeah, it's awful. And we totally forget this now. At the time, no one had any idea what went wrong. Right.

All this O-ring stuff we don't know for at least another couple weeks. So there's concerns about terrorism. There's concerns about sabotage. And this has never happened before, right? No. Wasn't it the only NASA deaths had been the three men who died who were part of Project Gemini? Exactly. And this continues to this day to some extent.

But NASA had this sort of invincible reputation that everybody loves NASA, right? It's we're putting men on the moon and it's these nerds doing math. Yes, I like NASA. Yes, me too. I mean, it's who can be against NASA? And so in the immediate aftermath of this, there's a huge rescue effort, of course. So they have to scan something like 300 square miles of ocean to recover all of the pieces. It's like a nine month effort.

There's divers. It's this huge thing. They do all of this burn analysis of the parts that they pull out of the water of they figure out where it's burned. Imagine being one of the divers or one of the people working on that project and for maybe months and months, that's your job every day is to go recover, you know, just little pieces of debris from the ocean. And also the people putting it together.

I mean, it's essentially the world's biggest episode of CSI that you're putting together puzzle pieces of rockets and only it's I think it's 20 or 30 percent of the rockets are ever recovered because the rest of it is just essentially vaporized or thrown too far away or too small. And so you have these fragments and based on these fragments, you have to figure out what actually happened. And a huge part of this is actually looking at the footage. So one of the things they find out relatively soon, because there's something like a hundred cameras looking at the space shuttle when it launches in these high def, high frame rate

cameras for the engineer. So in case anything does go wrong, they can look at it afterwards. They figure out that as right at launch, you can see a little puff of gray smoke from the back of one of the rocket boosters. And that is the first clue of the O-ring failure that there should not be a puff of gray smoke that comes out of the rocket. That is actually the O-ring failing, but the temperatures are so high that the silly putty, the putty that they're putting on it actually melts and closes the hole.

Oh, what happens is the failure is at launch, but it manages to go 73 seconds before it burns through the silly putty and the jet of fuel comes out. If that hadn't happened and if the silly putty hadn't filled in the hole at launch time, what would have happened if that hole just appeared during launch? Well, I mean, this is something that comes up actually. Speculate on this, NASA engineer friend. If they had known something was wrong that quickly, they theoretically could have aborted. But there's puff of gray smoke.

Nobody, I mean, if you look at the footage, it's tiny and it only shows up for a couple frames. And it's sort of in between the booster rocket and the main rocket too. So it's sort of hidden. So it's only when you look at footage from a hundred different cameras frame by frame that you're like, oh, that's weird. And like when you know what you're looking for. Yes. So the immediate aftermath is NASA is in complete disarray because it's never had anything

like this before. It has no protocols in place in case something goes wrong. It has no idea what it's doing. Boy, this is a real theme we've uncovered. Yes. President Reagan was actually scheduled to give the State of the Union the next day. And so they postponed that. Reagan gives a televised address with this very famous statement where he says,

we will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. Oh, Reagan is trash and we will get into the trashness of Reagan and this whole thing. But you have to give some credit of being the mourner in chief. Oh, yeah, he was good at that. He had human feelings and the lowest bar. But it is, you know, it's a nice poem.

He said he looked sincere reading it. You can see why he got elected. Yes. So then the second thing he does and this is really important is immediately he appoints a commission to look into the crash. Still no word on AIDS. Yeah, priorities, but it's actually interesting. So there's a presidential commission called the Rogers Commission because it's headed

by this guy named William Rogers, who was the former Secretary of State. And it's a little bit weird in that they pack this commission with a bunch of famous astronauts and scientists. So Neil Armstrong is on it. Chuck Yeager is on it. It's sort of a who's who of the greatest scientific minds. Importantly, there's also a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Richard Feynman, who's on it.

Oh, yeah, I love Richard Feynman. He makes physics fun. He's awesome. He's 68 at the time, but just like sharp as a tack, wonderful guy. I feel like if you like pack a special committee with a bunch of astronauts and physicists, they're going to go do like a cross Washington pub crawl to at some point. Oh, yeah, I read an oral history of the commission and there's these stories of Neil Armstrong basically just getting wasted all the time and telling stories of the moon landing.

I would certainly hope so. If I were Neil Armstrong, I would just like be making, you know, lunar landers out of my pretzels at the bar. So the first thing the Rogers Commission does and sort of the most important thing is they figure out the cause of the crash. This is huge. They have tons of people come and testify. They look at a million documents.

They figure out this O-ring thing. And then they achieved their declared end, which is truly astounding. And this is amazing TV moment where Richard Feynman, this physicist guy gets an O-ring from his friend's car. Every commission panelist, whatever has a glass of ice water in front of them. So he actually takes the O-ring, puts it in a figure eight and then puts it in a clamp to hold it in the figure eight and he dunks it in the water. This is while one of the scientists is testifying.

He's like, Oh, do you mind if I grab that? Okay, I'm just going to put this in my water. Don't mind me. When the guy is done testifying, he pulls the O-ring out of the water and undoes the clamp and you can actually see that the O-ring doesn't snap back into a circle. That it snaps back into like a Pringles shape. He does a Mr. Wizard. Yeah.

And it's, you know, there's so few good TV moments in these things because they're so boring. And because Richard Feynman is so rarely invited to be a part of it. Yeah. And then he says, I think this may have some relevance to the problem before us in like great scientific understatement. That's beautiful. So that's the first thing they do.

They figure out what actually happened. They figure out that it was just this O-ring and nothing else went wrong, which is completely wild on a ship that has like 20 million moving parts. Yeah. The second thing they do, and this becomes really important for the myth that forms about the Challenger explosion is the night before the launch, there was a teleconference between the managers and the engineers in which the engineers said, it's too cold. We should delay the launch.

What? So it turns out that NASA, of course, had outsourced the construction of the solid booster rockets to a military company, right? The same way we outsource everything to Lockheed Martin or whatever. They outsourced the construction of the booster rockets to this company called Morton Theacle, which I'm going to struggle to pronounce for this entire episode. This is going to be yet another, another sorted tale of government contracts gone wrong, isn't it? I mean, not to preview the ending, but extremely yes.

Because what happens is because these temperatures are forecast to be so cold overnight, NASA and the contractors decide to have a telecon. So they have a telecon with 34 people across five cities. You know, they've got Utah, they've got Houston, they've got Florida. So they're having like a massive miserable conference call 80s style. Yeah. I mean, even just doing this on Skype with 34 people sounds like a nosebleed. I have no idea what the technology was for conference calls then, but I'm sure it was abysmal.

Sure was just men shouting. And they're faxing each other slides and graphics and stuff. So in this telecon, the engineers say, we are concerned. We've never had a launch this cold before. There's this sort of retconning of this that happens in the late 1990s where a data visualization guru named Edward Tuft, he goes through actually the slides that the engineers showed the managers at NASA. And he shows that their data, the way that they presented it was awful.

So it's like these missile diagrams with like some squares are blacked in and some aren't and they're drawing it. And so what Edward Tuft does is he organizes all the data according to the temperature and how many problems with the O rings they had previously. And if you look at that graph, it's just starkly obvious that the colder it is, the more problems there are with the O rings. Boom, obvious. Okay.

And then a little bit after that, there's a article in a peer review journal. It's called like science and technology or one of these kind of main engineering journals. It's by these two engineers. And they're basically like, hello, we are two of the engineers that were on the phone call. And that explanation is totally wrong. Here is why. So this entire narrative of if only they had the better data visualization, it's like designed to be a New Yorker article or a podcast episode, right?

It's so is. It's like this one thing was different. Everything would have changed. And that's what we call the thing that the book is called. Yes. The missing quibble. Totally. And of course, the more complicated and more true explanation is that after these rocket boosters go for two minutes,

they fall off of the side of the rocket and they land in the ocean and then NASA goes and gets them. That's like how it's supposed to work. They're recyclable. And so NASA goes and gets them and finds there's damage to the O-ring. So they knew that sometimes there was damage to the O-rings and sometimes there wasn't, but they didn't really understand why. Oh, interesting. When you look at the data, it looks obvious that, oh, wow, the coldest launch had the most damage to the O-ring.

So obviously the cold is causing it. Well, what that explanation doesn't take into account is that the launch with the second most damage was the warmest launch ever. So they launched when it was 75 degrees and there was also damage to the O-rings. And what these two scientists say is that it really doesn't matter what the outside temperature is. What matters is the temperature of the O-rings. So they say in the same way that if you get a Bloody Mary and put a bunch of ice cubes in it and you walk outside on a 75 degree day, it's a long time before your Bloody Mary is 75 degrees.

And so one of the things that they didn't take into account was that the ambient temperature doesn't actually matter. What matters is essentially how cold was it overnight and how low did the temperature of the O-rings get? But they didn't know any of that then. But these are the things you learn by having a terrible disaster. Exactly. Another big thing was that the way the telecon went wasn't actually the engineers versus NASA. What actually happened was Morton Theacol guys say, it's too cold, we don't think you should launch.

NASA says, what is your data? What evidence are you using to present this idea that it's too cold to launch? And Morton Theacol says, well, we don't have any data because we've never launched when it's that cold before. And NASA is like, oh, so you're saying you have no evidence? Oh, come on, no. NASA, that's not good empirical reasoning. Like looking back on it, it's so obvious, right? Right.

But at the time, it's basically just like a feeling in the pit of their stomach among the engineers of like, Right. I don't feel great about this. Yeah. It just feels off. But then NASA is like, well, how do we know that it's the temperature? This whole thing with temperature hasn't come up before. So in a massive twist, the independent contractors are the girlfriend with the feeling in the perfect storm.

Yeah. And so they're presenting the data, people are shouting at each other, it gets really heated. NASA says, guys, this is getting too intense. Let's all take a 15 minute break. We'll all talk amongst our own teams and we'll come back in this break from the call. The Morton Theacol managers are like, sorry, guys, you don't have evidence to make this call. You don't have evidence to delay the launch. And without evidence, we can't do anything.

This is an evidence based organization. We're supposed to be science based. We're supposed to have the data in front of us on which to make the call and you guys don't have the data. So essentially, the engineers at Morton Theacol were overruled by their own managers. It's weird how the default is doing the more dangerous thing, though. That's an interesting thing to default to for lack of evidence. And also this idea that you need to have evidence for an unprecedented thing. It's like, oh, I shouldn't eat that hot dog off the ground.

Like, well, have you eaten a hot dog off the ground before? Then how do you know you shouldn't eat the hot dog off the ground? Well, it's also the same thing we saw with the Dingo's Got My Baby, where they're like, we know Dingo's don't eat babies, but if they did, here's exactly what it would and would not look like. Exactly. And also, I mean, what's kind of amazing is Morton Theacol then gives this sort of determination to launch and then NASA faxes them, you know, you have to sign off on it,

that, you know, the O-rings are sound and the engineers at Morton Theacol refuse to sign it. So the managers just sign in their place. Is that legal? Yeah. I mean, according to the procedures of the time, it's like, it's organizational structure. Like, my boss can overrule me. And so they got overruled by their bosses. Thanks.

Which, again, looks like one of those things. Now, it's like, ugh. But at the time, it was relatively normal. It was just like, we can't make a delay launch decision on the pit of your stomach. Right. This is really the main myth about the Challenger explosion that starts to get planted in the American consciousness is this idea that there was a telecon and the engineers made these objections. And then the information that the engineers objected didn't make it to the higher levels of management.

So on one of the first pages of the Rogers Commission Report is actually an org chart of NASA, where it's like, level one is the CEO, level two is the vice CEO level. And it goes down all these levels. The engineers are sort of at level five in the organization. And it talks about how the information that people were nervous about the O-rings never made it past level four. So it's like the middle managers found out about it and just didn't pass the information upward. It becomes this thing of, it's a problem of middle managers. It's a problem of information being blocked and that the CEO and the vice presidents

and all the really important people didn't have the information. Nobody knew when the launch decision was made that there had been this teleconference. Nobody knew that the engineers didn't sign the launch form. It was all at kind of the working level. Right. So the explanation is that NASA is going in blind. NASA doesn't even know that there had been these safety concerns and it just plows ahead. Nice.

So that's the main report. That's the conclusion of the main report. Another thing that I love is Richard Feynman, this physicist who did the O-ring demonstration. He puts out a dissenting report. He writes his own chapter. Obviously. He's writing this on his own. Nobody knows that he's going to do this.

And the main guy of the commission, Rogers, is super annoyed. So one of the things that Feynman does that is kind of a dick move is Rogers holds a press conference to announce all of the findings of the Rogers commission. The report's coming out tomorrow. Here's what we found. It's at 2 p.m. or whatever. Feynman is like, my press conference is at 3 p.m. Thank you.

So he has his own press conference to announce his own findings. So Rogers is like, fuck you. We're not putting this into the report. We're not doing your chapter. Feynman is like, I'm not changing it. So it ends up being an appendix. And what he says is basically the Rogers commission is thinking too small that it's not necessarily just that a couple middle managers got it wrong. It's that the entire management structure of the organization is not set up for danger.

So first of all, he notes that there's like four other technical problems that were just not solved. He notes that in the main external fuel tank, there's some turbine engine, something that I don't understand, but it's showing cracks. And he's like, guys, it's not great to have cracks in your turbine engine and just keep going. He says the biggest thing is that no one knew why there was damage to the O-rings. So they were doing all these launches. They'd get the booster rockets back and they'd be like, that's weird. The O-rings are eroded, huh? Then they just launch again.

So they're noticing the damage to O-rings on previous launches like a lot. And they're like, oh, well, anyway, none of our business. Exactly. And what's amazing is a lot of the managers are saying things like, well, it only eroded by 30%. So that means we have a 70% safety factor. It has 70 more percent to go. 30 is a lot of percents. Feynman is like, that is not what safety factor means.

Like, sorry, guys. The metaphor that he uses is if you're in a truck and you drive across a bridge and a pylon of the bridge gets a huge crack in it, you're not going to be like, oh, well, it only cracked 30% into the pylon. This is you using the bridge as it's designed. This is not an earthquake. This is not dropping a herd of elephants on the bridge. This is normal use of the bridge and you've got a 30% crack in it.

Nobody would consider that OK. It's like Richard Feynman is coming to check on, you know, a 7-Eleven franchise in Tampa. And he's like, why are you guys putting out hot dogs for three or four days in a row? And they're like, well, you know, no one really seems to complain. It seems fine. And we just, first we left him out for two days and then for three. And, you know, it's like how things just kind of like slide a little bit at a time. And then people just keep doing things that are, it seems like pretty unsafe practices.

But until they get some kind of result proving that it's a dangerous thing to do, they're going to kind of keep doing it because they just have to, what are they going to do? Make new hot dogs every time? Who has that kind of energy? Feynman is saying it's like sending your kids out to play and you're like, don't run in the street. It's dangerous.

And then the kids come back and say, well, we ran in the street and we didn't die. So it must not be dangerous. And then they run in the street again. Right. He also mentions that in the commission hearings, when they ask engineers, okay, what was the risk? What was the chance of the rocket exploding? They'll say like one in a thousand.

But then when you ask managers, what are the risks of the rocket exploding? They'll say, oh, one in a hundred thousand. So you've got two orders of magnitude difference. Yeah. The managers have no sense of what are the actual risks that this is all going to explode? Whereas the engineers, a one in a thousand chance is actually pretty high. I mean, if airplanes had that chance of crashing, we'd have hundreds of plane crashes every day. So a one in a thousand risk is a huge red flag.

And the farther you get away from it, the safer it becomes, interestingly enough. And so the big thing is this report and his dissent create this idea of a middle management problem. That there's information that is not flowing from the engineers to the top of the organization in the way that it should. So this really is the main explanation that most of the American public takes away from the Challenger explosion. Challenger non-explosion. So NASA has a 32 month hiatus from any space shuttle launches. I found a where are they now thing about all the middle managers in NASA and what happened to them?

That sounds like a good like tabula clickbait listicle. Where are they now? NASA middle managers of the mid eighties. I mean, as you'd expect, they all ended up transferred or demoted or whatever. But then weirdly, all the middle managers that actually objected also got demoted and transferred. So it's like the people that ignored the warnings ended up working on like NASA public relations or, you know, in different departments. But then also the people that were sort of the good guys that were like, I'm not comfortable with this mission. Those people were also demoted and transferred and worked for other company.

Like, it just seems like everybody ended up working in other companies. So it's not clear there was any real accountability within the organization. And also Morton Theacol, this contractor was still the contractor. Nobody cut their contract. It was just like, whoopsie. And then they just kept going as usual. So that's explanation number one, evil middle managers. The classic.

Yes. So there's going to be two your wrongs about that come out after this. This one is reaching like baklava levels of twists and folds. I feel like. So the Rogers Commission report comes out in June of 1986. The House of Representatives does its own investigation that comes out in October. The first thing the House committee realizes is that this idea that the Morton Theacol engineers are the good guys in all of this isn't really true.

So the idea of like evil NASA and the heroic contractors, that does not fit with the evidence at all. Boy, my emotions have really been taken on a coaster ride already. I'm trying to do as many twists as possible. So I'm just throwing you around emotionally. All right. David, to thank Shirley later. So one of the things that I cannot get over is, you know, when they do government projects, they don't really do them themselves.

They put out a request for proposals. So they're like, we need someone to build as a rocket booster. Right. I really have no idea how the government functions. That sounds like something they would do. You'll have to trust me. This is how it works. So they want a company to build these rocket boosters.

So they put out publicly. They say, we are looking for a company to build rocket boosters. You should be big and you should have this many employees and you should have this much expertise. And this is how much it should cost. And da, da, da. Right. So the House committee digs up the original request for proposals to build the solid rocket boosters. And it includes the phrase, it is imperative in all considerations of the proposal that effort

be made to minimize production and operating costs while maintaining reasonable design, performance, and reliability specifications. They're making a spaceship. Exactly. And already they're nickel and diming in the third sentence of the request for proposals. Ah, like if you're being unethically chief about a spaceship, what are you spending enough money on? And what's even worse? This is so much worse.

There's four companies that put in a bid and NASA has to score each one of the companies on, you know, the expertise of their staff, their experience in doing this before, the realistic-ness of their bid, et cetera. Hotness. More than vehicle, the winning company scores the worst out of all four of the bids. But are they the cheapest? Exactly. So yes, because they're the cheapest, NASA is just like, well, they sort of suck, but they're the cheapest.

So it's like when your dad goes out to buy you a bike for your birthday and you end up with like, you know, a Spider-Man bike for a child three years younger than you because that was what the guy had that week. Essentially, and this is how you get all of this jank balls O-ring stuff. They're just getting the worst company and, you know, there's all these problems. One of the most amazing things about the House Report that doesn't come up in the Rogers Commission Report is that as early as 1979, they're showing problems with the O-rings. Really? Starting in 1979, NASA engineers, important vehicle engineers, everybody is saying,

you really shouldn't use O-rings on this because of this flexing issue that the rockets are flexing. O-rings aren't really good for this. Because they're like, hey, we're building spaceships. Yeah. And what is clear by 1979, 1981, super early is that you just need to find a better way to join these different segments of the rocket booster. So really the twist here is that the same thing that destroyed the Challenger is what killed American manufacturing generally, is that for years and years, people were like, we should A, not be doing the cheapest thing possible, and B, we should try to innovate in some way.

Yes. And everyone was like, no. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's really amazing is that, you know, in the Commission Report, they're documenting all the times that people sent memos, people sent letters, people talked to their bosses about, we need to find a different way to do this. And again and again, the response is, it's too expensive. We can't start from scratch now.

Oh, my God. The most damning one that they print in the House Commission Report is an actual letter from Morton Theacol engineers to NASA. Sort of a progress report. What are we up to this week? And they're looking at all these problems with the O-rings. It says, executive summary, help. Oh, my God. And it's in all caps and with an exclamation point.

Executive summary, help? Yes. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Another thing that the House Committee mentions is that there's been a lot of cost cutting and budget cutting at NASA. And a lot of people are like the good people are leaving NASA because the salaries are really low. And so that's kind of a boring explanation. But I do think that these sorts of things really matter that if you can't keep technical and scientific people for a long time

and give them something that's comparable with what they would earn in the private sector, you're just not going to have very good people. And really importantly, you're going to have high turnover. So one of the things they mention is because of the low salaries, people don't stay for very long. So everyone who's working on this project at NASA is just churning through. And there's no one who has the seniority to say, well, this is how we did it in Apollo. And this is how we should do it now. It's just like these new people coming in.

They're mostly young. They're underpaid. They don't have the full view of everything. So all of this contributes to essentially the second explanation of the Challenger disaster is basically incompetence. So the first explanation is middle management didn't convey the information upwards. The second one is everyone just kind of sucks. Like the organization is just not very good at its job and is not taking seriously any of these risks. It's just sort of bumbling through.

And so this idea that forms after 1986 of the organization is kind of doing its best, but it just is like kind of dysfunctional and it's a bunch of millennials and it's they're not taking it seriously and they're underpaid and just sort of general government dysfunction idiot managers type of thing. And then 10 or 15 years goes by and this is where we meet Diane Vaughn, OK, who is going to take us into the explanation for why the Challenger disaster is an example of white color crime. Hello, Diane. Hello, Diane. Diane is a sociologist.

She's not a technical person. She starts writing articles about this in the 1990s and one of her articles. She talks about how an entire academic field in this 10 or 15 years has been built up around the Challenger disaster. Right. It shows up in Harvard Business School cases. And I found an article about the culture of politeness and why the Challenger explosion happened. I found one about toxic masculinity and the Challenger explosion. So whatever field you're in, right, economics or anthropology or whatever, everyone has their pet explanation for why Challenger really happened. And it's whatever we think is most wrong with society, probably.

Basically, yeah. Who am I to judge that though? It's fine. So you and I think it's capitalism, but other people could think it's, I don't know, perms. One thing that Diane Vaughn mentions in the methodology section of one of her papers is that most academics are basing their interpretation of events on the Rogers Commission Report and the House Committee Report, right? These two sort of 200 and something page reports. She mentions, though, these are actually executive summaries. They're long, but the Rogers Commission Report is actually five volumes.

It's more than a thousand pages long. And so is the House Committee Report. There's tons of additional archival material as appendices to these reports that very few people are reading. She also mentions even fewer academics look at the 200,000 pages of documents and interviews and transcripts that are held at the National Archives. And now that I've read all 200,000 pages, I have a different interpretation. Oh my God. You can like hear the rap air horn like bop, bop, bop, bop. Oh, God bless her.

It's like receipts, right? She's essentially like, none of you guys are really reading all of this. She goes through the way the Rogers Commission actually called witnesses that sort of bolstered its own version of events and a lot of people weren't called and a lot of information wasn't included in the report. And so first of all, she uncovers a bunch of new technical details about the crash. I mean, obviously the O-ring failing, all of that stuff is true. But what really happened, what really caused the jet of fuel to shoot out of the rocket boosters was a gust of wind. Really? Yeah, it's called a wind shear because it's really high altitude.

The worst wind shear ever recorded on a space shuttle mission happened 50 seconds into the flight. Wow. If this gust of wind hadn't knocked off the silly putty, everything would have been fine. Oh. So, you know, this doesn't change completely the interpretation of events, but it's just like, OK, Diane, like, she knows what she's doing. Like, we're in Diane's hands now. Diane's got the whole world at her hands. Another thing she mentions that is really important for all the political considerations that go into this is that before the Challenger launch, it had already been delayed four times.

And one of the reason why there was all this urgency to launch on that day was because people were really sick of the delays. They were like, another delay. Come on. We've already delayed this four times. We already know about the weather. What are we doing? There's also a really dark thing is that they were going to do it. I think it was two weeks previously because Vice President George HW Bush was going to be there for the launch. And then they said, oh, you know, it looks like we've got a weather front coming in.

Don't fly all the way down to Cape Canaveral. But then the weather front that they were expecting never came. It was perfect launch weather. And if they had launched on that day, nothing would have been a problem. So they postponed it essentially for political reasons. And then because he wasn't there, they were like, oh, I guess we've already delayed it. So let's just delay it again. The fact that it's because of, well, you know, what if he sees on our Instagram that we had the rocket launch anyway?

That would be embarrassing. You know, it's a tragedy and you can never look back and counterfactuals and whatever, but it sucks. You know, it sucks. But the biggest thing that she says, and I think this is really important for understanding what was really going on, is that everyone puts all of this importance on the teleconference the night before, right? That if only the information had gotten up to the higher levels, they would have known that there were these concerns and they would have acted differently. She says the central fact is that there's no evidence that they wouldn't have gone ahead with the launch.

That is quite dark. Even if they had known the concerns, they would not have acted any differently. I feel like this episode is like this truffle of like American darkness. I know. First layer is pretty dark, isn't it? And I'm like, yeah. And you're like, what about if we go to another layer and then another layer? And then it's a liqueur made of pure pointlessness and fear.

She says the infamous teleconference can only be understood as one decision in a long line of decisions that show an incremental descent into poor judgment. So what she says is the real linchpin is not the teleconference. The real linchpin is the first time the rocket comes back with damage to the O-rings and they just keep going. That's the key decision. Right. That comes from above. That comes from an entire organization that is organized around,

we must launch, we must launch, we must launch. The cost-cutting stuff is obviously bad and is obviously a contributor to this. But the real damage, she calls it bureau pathological. That's so good. Isn't it great? Oh, I am. She says what really made NASA bureau pathological was this huge incentive and this huge pressure from politicians, from Congress and from Reagan, to make spaceflight routine.

Why? It all comes out of this existential crisis that NASA was having after the Apollo missions, where Apollo missions went super well. Everyone loves the space program. And then it's like, well, now what? So it's like George Lucas trying to write a prequel. I mean, exactly. Nixon had scrapped the idea of going to Mars.

Moon landings sort of aren't as cool and they can't learn as much as they used to. And then what they're under pressure to do is not necessarily that they had to cut costs. It's this idea that they had to start to act like a private sector actor. So one of the things that's totally been overlooked in this is that the Challenger, the space shuttle itself, was selling cargo bays to private companies. Oh. So that they could put in satellites like communication satellites and other things that needed to go up into space.

There was this idea that you can make spaceflight commercially viable. Okay. And so there's just the feeling that NASA has to just become part of the private sector in some, in a way, that's very strange. Yeah. I mean, we saw the same thing with the post office in the Going Postal episode, that every arm of the government sector has to start thinking like a business and has to start becoming more efficient.

And so they had set the goal for NASA to have 60 shuttle launches a year. This was the goal that they were supposed to be working toward because it was supposed to become routine. But why? Why do we have to have routine rocket launches? Why is this necessary? Is it like NASA is, like your Instagram friend is like, January, you're going to do the whole 30, whatever that is.

And, you know, people who like set endless rules for themselves and you're like, what is the point of any of this? Why do we need to do 60 rocket launches a year? What would be different if we didn't do that? That like because space travel isn't the spectacular new thing anymore, it has to become something like a bus. I mean, that's the thing is like that year, 1986. They had 15 launches scheduled.

They wanted to just bang them out. And again, one of the reasons why they didn't want to delay the launch of the Challenger was because they had two launches coming up in the same month that had to be timed with the orbit of Jupiter. So one of the reasons they didn't want to delay was like, well, that's going to mess up our whole schedule for the year. And so this drive to produce and this drive to just get the shuttles out, man, that was impossible when you put safety at the center of everything.

You know, I really don't think of NASA as just having a board up, you know, on the floor being like, we have had an X number of days since a space accident, you know, and this one has to wipe it off and write a zero on it. And another sort of really dark thing about this is that taking Krista Makalov on the flight was one of the things that they wanted to do for political reasons to make spaceflight seem safe and routine. They wanted to get into this mode of look, normal people can go into space. This month, it's going to be a teacher.

Next month, it's going to be a forest ranger. And the next month after that, it'll be another scientist. And so the word that Diane Vaughn quotes NASA administrators is saying a lot is operational. We know how to do this. We've done it a million times. It's super routine. It's not. You're just pretending like it is.

And you're by pretending so hard. You're courting disaster. Totally. And keep in mind that this is at a time of budget cuts, too. It's do more with less. And a huge reason for this was they were also under pressure to contract more and more things out. So one of the things we forget about the Apollo missions is that everything was done in-house. I didn't know that.

All of the scientists were NASA scientists. NASA badges, NASA employee cafeteria. It was all NASA all the time. Since I grew up watching Apollo 13, to me it's like, well, NASA is a bunch of guys in a room. And they can all see each other and talk to each other. And they're in Houston, I guess. Yeah. And if there's a problem, then they can all discuss it and figure it out.

And then Tom Hanks comes home from space. Yeah. And no, these guys are manufacturing some of the parts in Utah. And it's so disincentivized, too, because if you're already reluctant to bring up a concern you have to your boss, which people are reluctant to do generally, then you think about like, what are the odds that he's going to talk to his boss? They're going to talk to the NASA people. The NASA people are going to talk to like, what are the odds of this going through like, you know, what, four or five different little transistors in this big system? You're just much more likely to not say anything, I think.

And what Diane Vaughn says, and I think this is really crucial, is that one of the huge differences of later NASA and earlier NASA is that NASA scientists weren't doing science anymore. NASA scientists were doing project management. Once your organization starts outsourcing stuff, you as a scientist are not doing the primary work anymore. What you're doing is basically client relations, right? You're dealing with a contractor. Boy, there's like a novel to be written about a guy working for NASA in the 80s, and he's been there since the Apollo days. And now he just like goes and gets drunk on his roof, you know, on the weekends. Like, it's that kind of feeling of like, we used to make things.

Yeah. And then, you know, you as a NASA person, you essentially become a NASA administrator. You don't necessarily know the engineers because they're in a different city or maybe you see them every once in a while, but they're kind of sucking up to you, right? Because you are the source of funding. So you're not getting an on the ground view. Mostly what you're doing is you're applying, you know, checklists and you're applying project management scheduling things and you're making sure everything is flowing well. But you're not connected in the same way and that work is not as rewarding. So another reason why scientists were leaving NASA is because they're not trained as administrators.

Yeah. One of the things that Diane Vaughn mentions is that NASA is not like a macho organization. These are nerds. These are people that are super safety oriented. Yes, that's why I've always liked NASA. Exactly. And so she talks about how a lot of the engineers said, I personally put safety number one, but the organization that I work in doesn't allow me to do that. So NASA at this point is like just a bunch of nerds with stomach aches.

Yeah, exactly. And also, I mean, even the break between management and engineering is a little bit fake in that, you know, NASA did start bringing on more, you know, Harvard MBAs and business school types. But a lot of the managers in NASA were actually former scientists and engineers. They had worked their way up. So a lot of them were actually very safety conscious. And then a lot of the engineers had actually internalized this production mindset. So she mentions on the infamous teleconference, there's 14 engineers and only three of them didn't want to launch. Huh.

So even within the engineers, they absorbed all of the standard that had been handed down to them. And we're just like, guys, we got to we got to meet these deadlines. We got to meet the schedule because that's what they're being judged on all of a sudden. And they're used to continually having feelings of vague misgivings that they can't support to the degree that they have to to make anything be different. And being overruled, right? It's like they're just used to being sort of shunted aside in favor of schedules. We got to launch 45 other shuttles this week. So let's go.

And, you know, the more theoretical engineer said, you know, hey, NASA, we shouldn't launch until it's 53 degrees. A reason why NASA didn't want to do that wait till 53 degrees was because then it establishes a standard for every future launch. So you're like, well, if we wait for 53 degrees on this launch, this becomes the standard. This is going to be a pain in the ass for all the other launches we have next year. So they're like, well, if we have to do the safe thing, it'll really undermine our other unsafe practices. So no. This is from Diane Vaughan's book. After the Challenger disaster, media reports charge that a can do attitude at NASA contributed to the technical failure.

That can do attitude was not equally distributed throughout the organization. And that's a really important point in that a lot of the engineers were coming, you know, slowly realizing we're never going to do 60 launches a year. This is insane, right? We would need three times the staff. We would need 10 more years to even remotely get up to that schedule. But the managers were like, no, no, we have to do this. We have to put all this downward pressure. They were asking their engineers essentially to do something impossible.

That's more than one a week. There were only 22 episodes of cheers in 1986. Like, let's put it in perspective that way. Everything about the teleconference and everything that happened with the decision to launch, no one was bending the rules. They were following the rules. And this, to me, establishes why this is white-collar crime, in that when everyone is following the rules and something terrible happens, the fault is with the person who sets the rules. This is also, this is from the intro of Deanne Fallon's book.

And I think it's really crucial to understanding this interpretation. She says, in terms of individual accountability, middle managers were, of course, responsible, but their isolation in the spotlight deflected attention from the responsibility of top decision makers who made political bargains, established goals, allocated resources, and made other key decisions that altered the structure and the culture of NASA. So she's essentially saying that they transformed NASA from a research and development organization into a business. It was capitalism all along. You're so happy.

I am. I'm always happy when it, because it just so clearly was capitalism, right? You can see the little capitalism of hoof prints in the snow. You're like, right. Yet again, this is because something as intricate as a shuttle launch was turned into something that there were quotas for, for no reason. Yeah. Except that in America, if, you know, we just don't want something to be in the middle ground between completely new and terrifying and exciting and brave and totally easy and seamless and like taking a bus to Cleveland. And this is another great phrase that Diane Vaughan has is the normalization of deviance.

Ah, Diane, I like you. That's essentially what the organization came to do. That all of these things that had been deviant of why are the O-rings eroding by 30% became a sign of resilience. Became, look, the O-rings are eroding and they're still working. Let's keep going, right? It's like, look how great these O-rings are. This single mom has three jobs and sleeps in her car every night, but she's supporting her entire family. This is a sustainable situation.

It's like dark viral inspiration content. Exactly. The way that it's supposed to work is you don't launch unless you have great evidence that you should launch. And over time, it becomes we have to launch unless there's great evidence that we shouldn't, right? The default became we have to launch and that's the heart of why this is an example of white color crime. Yeah. Because I don't feel comfortable blaming any of the individual engineers or any of the individual project managers because everyone is doing what they're supposed to do.

It's the system working as intended. And at every level and the sort of like miniscule cost cutting levels and in the overall mission statement of like, we're going to treat this as quotidian and workaday a thing as we can, as we possibly can. And in a way that is very disconnected from reality, but that's what we're doing right now. Exactly. This is such a Jurassic Park type situation too, right? Where it's like you figure out how to clone dinosaurs and then you immediately turn them into a theme park. And it's like we've only been putting people in space since the 60s.

I know. Like slow down. I know. And then I mean, the real epilogue to this is that she mentions also that NASA essentially learned nothing from this because NASA also took the middle manager explanation and then they have another space shuttle that explodes in 2003. Was that it? Is that what happened? Yeah. This is why we don't have space shuttles anymore.

So the organization is completely shifted to unmanned missions for good reason. It's essentially an acknowledgement of the fact that it might never be safe enough to send humans out. And also if we're going to get the space shuttle to the point where it's routine, fine, let's do it a hundred times without people on it. Right? Let's make sure we are actually good at this and it is actually routine and then we'll put people on it again. Yeah. So now that we're all depressed, what note do we want to end on?

You know, just that it's capitalism's fault as always. Surprise. Yeah, your tagline was so prescient. I don't know. I find it reassuring that it's the same mistakes over and over again, right? Like we're looking at the same kind of systemic flaws functioning in NASA that we see in episodes where we look at things that went horribly wrong in our legal system. Like it's never just an O-ring, right?

It's never just this one thing that no one could have predicted. It's always this whole human structure that allowed for a blind spot big enough for the O-ring. Right. You know, I do think that finding out in the end that the problem is us is good news because we can work on ourselves. Ooh. I believe. That's like a nice fake optimistic note to end on. It's not fake.

I'm genuinely this absurdly Pollyanna-like. It's scary but true.