Understanding engineering ethics surrounding the Challenger disaster

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor The Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Center hosted the final event in the Challenger Series, “The Challenger Disaster: Communication, Culture, and Ethics,” over Zoom March 5. The event was led by guest speakers Jennifer Braggin and Amy Hirschfeld from the Gordon Institute at Tufts University. Braggin said she teaches engineering leadership, while Hirschfeld teaches technical and managerial communication. “We both, in our curriculum, have used the lessons of the Challenger to influence future engineering leaders and particularly help them understand the impact of their choices, communication, and the application of ethics in their future careers,” Braggin said. She was a first-grader in 1986, and saw the disaster in the classroom, she said. Braggin said she remembers the “sadness and terror” on her teacher’s face when it happened, and how the teacher must have thought about how to explain it to the class. Hirschfeld said she was a first-year student in college when the disaster occurred. There were TVs in the dining hall in order to see the launch, and she specifically remembers the “complete silence in the room as we watched,” Hirschfeld said. Throughout her 25 years of teaching, she said she has often used the Challenger as a case study. Students sometimes point out that the disaster happened before they were born, but she ultimately decided that the case is as relevant as ever, she said. “It’s not just about technologies, it’s really about human behavior. And the engineering students of today are going to face some of the same ethical questions and work within some of the same cultures that the engineers and managers working on the Challenger did,” Hirschfeld said. Braggin said the Challenger required the work of tens of thousands of professionals to complete. To this day, engineering still requires communication and teamwork built on culture and ethics, she said. They discussed what was the most important factor that caused the Challenger disaster, and Braggin said from an engineering standpoint, it’s easy to assume it was the failure of the O-rings. She said it’s much more than that because of the sheer scale of different people and work cultures. The “safety culture” was already ingrained in NASA, but it was not enough to overcome communication failures, she said. Everyone involved in the Challenger were professionals, so Braggin asked the audience to share what they expected from professionals. She said the public assumes professionals have enough training and decision-making skills to make important decisions while maintaining their own integrity. When it comes to engineering professions, the code of conduct always emphasizes safety, she said. Hirschfeld said there were multiple organizations involved in the launch of the Challenger. These included NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Morton Thiokol International (MTI), she said. The Marshall Space Flight Center is NASA’s field center that was responsible for both the space shuttle program and overseeing subcontractors, such as MTI, she said MTI designed the solid rocket boosters containing the O-rings that failed, she said. Braggin said the relationships among these organizations are particularly interesting, because while each of them has a vested interest in the success of the Challenger, they’re also under various pressures. The complexity of their relationships as suppliers and recipients is similar to what’s seen today, she said. Hirschfeld said a factor to think about is how, in some of these “power relationships,” sharing bad news can be risky. “Somebody might be thinking about, ‘Will we lose our contract if we’re sharing too much bad news?’ or ‘Who will be responsible when something goes wrong?’” Hirschfeld said. This influences what kind of communication the people involved are willing to make, she added. One important audience that had an influence was the general public, she said. As the first teacher selected to go into space, McAuliffe drew a lot of public interest, she said. There was also a planned State of the Union on the evening of the launch, which was supposed to focus on the success of the project, she said. “There was a sense of national pride surrounding this project, and this launch in particular,” Hirschfeld said. All of this impacted the decision-making and communication surrounding the launch, she said. During the final teleconference, where the decision to launch was made, all of MTI’s engineers recommended delaying the launch, Hirschfeld said. But then one of their vice presidents told the rest of the VPs to “Take off your engineer’s hat and put on your manager’s hat,” she said. Then all four vice presidents agreed to launch and chose to ignore the engineers’ warnings, she said. Hirschfeld said while it is easy to say now that the managers prioritized their reputation over safety, back then, communication wasn’t as reliable, and it’s possible the managers really didn’t understand the risk. The shuttle had been flying for years with no problem, but on the day of the Challenger launch, the temperature was much lower than it had ever been before, she said. “They really didn’t have anything that could prove something would go wrong. And I think the managers wanted proof that the engineers couldn’t provide because that situation had never happened before,” Hirschfeld said.