College officials figuring out how to bring students back to campus resemble the Challenger engineers tasked with building a rocket to fit political considerations, Janet Murray argues.

Photo: Kennedy Space Center. Article by Janet H. Murray.

College officials figuring out how to bring students back to campus resemble the Challenger engineers tasked with building a rocket to fit political considerations, Janet Murray argues.

On Jan. 28, 1986, the NASA Challenger blew up on launching. Like many Americans, I was devastated to see technology fail us so painfully and spectacularly. I followed the investigations of the disaster very closely, which showed that the original sin that led to the explosion was not the infamous O-rings, which could not withstand the cold launch temperatures.

Rather, it was the political decision to build a booster rocket in two pieces, requiring O-rings, so it could be transported from Utah, the home of the politically connected manufacturer who was awarded the contract, to Florida, where the launch took place.

I’m sure many of the Utah engineers who designed the fatal Challenger booster rocket did their jobs earnestly and capably. I’m sure none of them wanted the rocket to blow up. But as the risk of the O-rings became more apparent, something prevented them from naming the problem and thinking clearly about it. They became prisoners of groupthink, […]

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