Question
Summary of the given article and explain the followed questions: sarpy hydraulic power units have started t-minus 21 seconds in the solid rocket booster engine
Summary of the given article and explain the followed questions:
sarpy hydraulic power units have started t-minus 21 seconds in the solid rocket
booster engine gimbal now underway he - 15 seconds t-minus 10 9 8 7 6. we have main engine start four three two one and liftoff lift off the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower a troll program confirmed challenger now heading downrange
sarpy hydraulic power units have started t-minus 21 seconds and the solid rocket
booster engine gimbal now underway t-minus 15 seconds even a camera man eight seven six we have main engine start four three two one and liftoff liftoff of the 25th
space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower a troll program confirmed
challenger now heading downrange my controllers here looking very carefully at the situation I'm Alan J McDonald and I am currently an aerospace consultant and author of a book called truth lies no rings inside the space shuttle Challenger disaster
the time of the Challenger disaster I was the director of the Space Shuttle solid rocket motor project for Morton Thiokol the manufacturers of the large solid rocket boosters on the show I'm gonna discuss the Challenger accident how it the launch evolved what happened to the Challenger during its launch and some of the Inquisition that happened as a result of the investigation by a Presidential Commission on the accident
the Challenger disaster happened on the morning of January 28 1986 it took place
that on pad 39b at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida I received a telephone
call from a fellow that work for me and he said that Lee says we were just told
that there was a weather forecaster I believe in Orlando that was forecasting
a cold front in in the area of Florida that might drop temperatures as low as 18 degrees Fahrenheit by tomorrow morning and we're really concerned about
whether the o-ring seals and fuel joints the saud rocket booster will operate at
those temperatures properly and I said well I'm very concerned about that too
they set out what you need to do for us is just get a hold of somebody at the
Cape there from NASA to find out what they're projecting hour by hour all
through the night at the launch site not in Orlando so that we can calculate what
the actual temperature will be on various parts of our boosters by the
opening of the launch window I says I will get that information and call it
back to you but I said when you get it here's what I want you to do I want you
to get the engineers to get and have them make an assessment of their concerns of the cold temperatures on the ceiling of those o-rings seals and I would like them to make a
recommendations what is the lowest safest temperature to launch that we can
tolerate and I want that decision and recommendation to be made by the
vice-president engineering not program management I felt that that was a thorny
technical issue and should be decided on its technical merits only and as a result I requested that the vice president of engineering make that recommendation so I called the NASA rep there and arrange for that teleconference that evening and it was a three-way teleconference between the engineers in Utah those of NASA in Alabama and our management at Kennedy Space Center in Florida so it was not surprising to me that after the engineers presented their information the Vice brand engineering came on just
as I requested and recommended that they do not launch the Challenger below 53
degrees Fahrenheit which was primarily based on that observation of that flight
a year earlier the NASA management really didn't accept that conclusion and felt that if we're going to change the launch commit criteria we needed to anchor it in something better than just this qualitatively officer observation and here was a condition which we had claimed those in our opinion going in a direction that may well cause a failure a very catastrophic failure and so what happened is that my boss mr. Joe elminster who was the vice president of space mr. programs came on the telecon and asked for a five minute off line caucus to make sure that we presented everything that we had
available to us and see if we could better analyze the joint to determine if there was a lower temperature that was safe too long what really surprised me was that when
the management of my company came back on a half-hour later on the teleconference it wasn't the vice-president engineering anymore who made the recommendation not to launch but all 53 degrees Farenheit it was my boss the vice president they supposed to
programs had a program management and he said that they had recessed all of their
data and they have concluded that it's okay to proceed with the launch as planned no restrictions at all no temperature requirement whatsoever well NASA reaction was is that well they accepted that without any question, but they needed that recommendation put in writing and signed by a responsible Thiokol official well I knew who that responsible FAQ all official was that was me that's why I was there and I made
the smartest decision ever made my lifetime I refused to sign it now I didn't think it was untold unethical that the NASA people questioned how we arrived at that decision and the data we presented what was unethical as they knew that we had a moral obligation to always Provo was safe and what they had just done was but the engineering people
in a position to prove that it would fail that's a totally different question you're never supposed to do that and in fact the final decision which I didn't know at the time I found out later was that the general manager decided not to listen to the engineers who still felt
that it was too risky and tried to convince him not to change the decision even though he thought that NASA had some good questions and he kind of agreed with him he decided that he was going to pull his management team which ended up as only the vice president as to whether we should launch or not now this was at the time all unknown to me
because I was back at the Cape but I was so disturbed with the change the launch
recommendation and we were waiting for the written recommendation to come back
from our plant in Utah that I turned to the NASA management people I said you
know I said I really don't feel comfortable with that decision I don't agree with it but more
importantly you cannot even accept that recommendation this is what do you mean
how I said you cannot accept it because you know and I know that you're asking us to fly those solid rocket motors outside a temperature it's been qualified to fly and you can't do that you can't fly any of the shuttle Hardware outside of its qualification Lemmons that's against protocol so you can't accept it I'm recommending launching not based on what I know but what I do not know and you're in exactly the same position they said out you know these shouldn't be your concerns but we'll pass them on into in an advisory
capacity only and they said where's this fax that signed by your official and so
happened the fax machine was the other end of the building so I went down there
and it took duck awhile to come in but I finally brought it back yeah when I brought it back they were in a teleconference with one of the people on the mission management team since I was gone for 15-20 minutes I presumed they talked about the o-ring issue earlier
and I was shocked to find out later they never mentioned well I remember getting up early that morning of the launch and I was carrying my briefcase in one hand and my head
said and the other going to launch control center and I remember hearing on the radio was 22 degrees Fahrenheit at the time I went into the launch control center and sat down at a console that I'm supposed to be at to monitor all the data on the solid rocket boosters and in the corner of that TV monitor that I have they have access to various cameras
that are on the vehicle that you can punch in and look at I remember I started looking some of the cameras and I noticed there was ice hanging on the vehicle there was ice hanging on platforms next to it and I quickly concluded myself well then I'm gonna launch this thing today and the next thing I noticed was several minutes later they decided to send a nice team out to the launch platform to knock down as much as the ice they possibly could and take it off a mobile launch platform because their concern of debris and they did that and after they did that they picked up the count again and they finally made another stop in the count to go back and send the ice team again to relook at the launch pad and they did came back and concluded that it was okay to proceed with the launch which really surprised me but they did now I really expected if the o-rings would fail because of cold temperature they would do that right at ignition when you like
these solid rocket boosters strangely enough some 73 seconds later the whole vehicle looked like it had exploded in the and I was watching it on the TV camera with one eye on the pressure traces of solid rocket boosters and the data we were monitoring and it was absolutely shocking to everyone that was in their control room I could hear some people
actually sobbing in the background because they knew that this was unsurvivable I went to Huntsville Alabama at the monaster Marshall Space Flight Center next morning he was part of the failure analysis team NASA was formed on the solid rockets and I was about to convince that yeah this was 13:15 caused by in my penis I probably was a cracked turbine blade in the Space Shuttle main engines finally came loose because they were having that problem and went through the tank and that because the explosion or the tank structurally came apart and exploded and I was ready to leave and go home cuz
I've been gone for about a week and I actually walked out the door and I was heading out the door and this fellow from NASA that argued with the night for but named Mallory Malloy said oh you need to get back in here I says why says we've got Jim Kingsbury the director of science and engineering for Marshall was at the Cape looking at some movies and films of the launch and he claims he can see some fire coming out of the side of
Mounier solid rocket boosters just before the explosion my heart sank when I saw the actual launch film because I thought you know it probably did happen exactly for the reason we were concerned the night before the launch the o-rings were too cold and it wasn't until President Reagan decided to form a Presidential Commission where the real
answers came out and primarily from me not NASA what had happened as I stayed and worked on that failure team within a few days I presented to NASA exactly how the
Challenger failed and it was due to the cold old ring issue that we had addressed the night before it just manifests itself in a final failure quite different than we expected but that's why it really failed it was clear that they didn't want to hear that and what had happened was one of the NASA people in Washington who was a budget analyst had sent a memo he had written to the New York Times and it was about this problem that we had with his own rings and the joints well at that time NASA had never breathed the president Commission on anything what had caused the accident at all they knew nothing about any and yet it was almost a week earlier had briefed him exactly what caused it so they scheduled a closed hearing that afternoon with NASA well NASA wanted all my charts that I had given to headquarters the previous summer and I gave it to him I remember going up to this briefing and it was in the old executive office building next to the White House and the NASA folks made it very clear they were going to give the entire briefing no one else need to make any comments unless they were specifically requested to do
so and fellow was briefing was a fellow I argued with and he was going through these charts meet me for about an hour and a half and the Commission asked for a break they took a break they came back and I remember dr. Sally Ride before she sat down she was thumbing through a bunch of bleep telephone she says before we get back to the
briefing because the guy who agrees I'd like to ask you a question I at least I returned a few my phone calls and one of most some reporter here in Washington that asked me if I was really true they'd heard a rumor that one of the contractors may have been concerned about the cold temperatures hardware maybe even recommended not
launching is that really true in fact he said we had a teleconference about their concerns of the projected temperatures on the field joints and o-rings and as a result of that
teleconference we had all their engineers and communication with all our engineers in Alabama and the management Kennedy and we viewed all that and has resolved that conference Martin thought Kyle recommended that we proceed on with the launch as planned and they submitted a written statement to that effect I'm back this briefing and I thought well I guess that's a true statement but that is about misleading is anything I ever
saw and most certainly unethical and so I finally started walking down the stairs towards the conference table with the commissioners were sitting at and mr. Larry Malloy was given this briefing was living on the charts that I'd given him in fact that morning it was being asked some questions about it he said I think I all my come has something to add
here I think this Commission should know that Martin Thiokol was so concerned about the projected cold temperatures on our field joints and o-rings that we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit I remember chairman William Rogers who
was the head of the Presidential Commission and his vice chairman who was neil armstrong and dr. richard fineman they all kinda stood up and try to peek it but this guy was coming down here and when Rogers was the ex secretary stayed in her Nixon and Attorney General under Eisenhower he looked at me and he says well who in the hell are you he said would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard
because if I heard what I think I heard this will be in litigation for years to come my life changed when he said that because I knew who was going to be in the middle of all
of this litigation for years to come me looking back at all the decisions and things that happened there's two criteria I always looked at with regard to ethics there's ethics that are associated with having to make tough decisions tough pressure time constraints in that environment and there's those that aren't which I consider those frankly are the worst ethical issues and both of those occurred in the Challenger decision I'm proud of what I did but as far as ethics was concerned the biggest breach of ethics was the fact that both my company and NASA attempted to cover up what really happened that night before the
launch and there was a person by NASA on what really caused the final accident
which I went over with the Presidential Commission before they filed a report and they agreed with me and to me that was a bigger error than the pressure at the time the launch from a breach of ethics because they had time to think about it and to save people one of the big disappointments I had after going through a lot and a lot of the lessons
that were learned from Challenger we're fairly well implemented immediately after but they carried over to a point where they finally were forgotten some 17 years later when they launched the Columbia that year in 2003 they clearly saw on the film this huge piece of foam was called ramp phone off the tank impact the orbiter and it actually impacted the leading edge rather than under the tile and the shadow they then ran some analysis of what that impact damage could be and they had the fanciest most up-to-date computer model there was available at that time into and concluded that the damage wasn't
significant enough that they couldn't return home safely there were some engineers at Langley that didn't feel comfortable that that was the case and said well we can find out for sure by asking the Department of Defense to turn one of their spy satellites towards the orbiter in orbit facing towards it and it will see it in space if it has significant damage that it would be a catastrophic reentry so they made a specific request to the mission management team to do that and it so happened that the mission management team declined that request on the basis that they'd had an analysis done by Boeing on this crater model of computer program that was the most fancy thing in the world and that they don't feel that it was adequate damage so they didn't need to go through the protocol
and all the make a request to make this pictures the first time in the 50-year history of NASA that I saw they they went from a can-do to I can't do & that was the most serious mistake and most unethical mistake I think they probably made in their entire history one of the lessons learned that tell students also is this don't always believe in all your big computer programs you should gut feeling in some back-of-the-envelope test of
reasonableness checks on some of those answers because that will give you a far more confidence and I'll tell you some people have better judgment just saying you know what doesn't smell right and and you need to do that and so that's the other lessons learned and don't presume anything you think it's important make sure that what you thought was important got to the right people so that's what I wished I would have done.
Now, Explain the following in concern with the article given above:
1. Provide a brief summary and evaluation of the video from the perspective of a Project Manager who adheres to the PMI Code of Ethics.
2. What sections of thePMI Code of Conductwere violated by the stakeholders - explain how & why?
3. From the perspective of a Project Manager, what lessons can be learned from this incident?
Step by Step Solution
There are 3 Steps involved in it
Step: 1
![blur-text-image](https://dsd5zvtm8ll6.cloudfront.net/includes/images/document_product_info/blur-text-image.webp)
Get Instant Access with AI-Powered Solutions
See step-by-step solutions with expert insights and AI powered tools for academic success
Step: 2
![blur-text-image](https://dsd5zvtm8ll6.cloudfront.net/includes/images/document_product_info/blur-subtext-image.webp)
Step: 3
![blur-text-image](https://dsd5zvtm8ll6.cloudfront.net/includes/images/document_product_info/blur-subtext-image.webp)
Ace Your Homework with AI
Get the answers you need in no time with our AI-driven, step-by-step assistance
Get Started