Remembering Challenger

On 28 January 1986, 40 years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Six astronauts and a teacher from New Hampshire died when the crew cabin of the orbiter impacted the Atlantic Ocean more than three minutes later; most of them were likely conscious and aware at the time.

The Rogers Commission Report on the disaster concluded that Morton Thiokol managers Jerry Mason, Joe Kilminster, and Robert Lund had overruled their engineers, particularly Bob Eberling, under pressure from Lawrence Mulloy and George Hardy at NASA.

Physicist Richard Feynman revealed the systemic failures at both organizations, in particular NASA's habit of determining what the probability of disaster ought to be, and then working backward to the data they actually had, rather than determining the probability from the data. NASA claimed that the probability of a shuttle disaster was 1 in 100,000; the actual probability turned out to be 1 in 67.5 over the life of the program. I am not aware of any other vehicle ever produced that killed its occupants 1.4% of the time and stayed in service for 20 years.

In unrelated news, NPR revealed this morning that the Department of Energy has secretly loosened nuclear safety regulations to encourage development of the next-generation of reactors. According to NPR,

The orders slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors. They also loosen protections for groundwater and the environment and eliminate at least one key safety role. The new orders cut back on requirements for keeping records, and they raise the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to before an official accident investigation is triggered.

The new orders strip out some guiding principles of nuclear safety, notably a concept known as "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA), which requires nuclear reactor operators to keep levels of radiation exposure below the legal limit whenever they can. The ALARA standard has been in use for decades at both the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Removing the standard means that new reactors could be constructed with less concrete shielding, and workers could work longer shifts, potentially receiving higher doses of radiation, according to Tison Campbell, a partner at K&L Gates who previously worked as a lawyer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Any connection with the Challenger disaster is purely coincidental, except for the part about how both occurred in the second terms of Republican presidents obsessed with corporate profitability at the expense of safety.