Bosco Lee Morton Thiokol O-ring engineering decision

Roger Boisjoly's recommendation against launch on the cold morning; managers overrode it. (Tom names the company as ATK Alliant — the corporate successor — rather than Morton Thiokol; not corrected.)

This is potentially a good application for composites. Rolls-Royce just gave the contract to ATK Alliant — Alliant Technology, I can't remember what the K stands for. They're in Magna, Utah. What were they famous for? Anybody know what Alliant built that blew up? Space shuttle Challenger — the seals. That was all Alliant technology. They designed the seals for the Challenger that caused the Challenger to blow up. An engineer, Boss Juliet [Boisjoly] at Alliant, said don't, it's too cold, don't fly it. But they were going to fly the Challenger. Anyone remember the reason why they flew the Challenger?

The specific engineer (Tom calls him "Bosco Lee"; actual name Roger Boisjoly) who tried to stop the launch. The "take off your engineer hat and put on your manager's hat" line is the teaching beat. Tom returns in §7.p1 to note that Boisjoly resigned from Thiokol and went on the lecture circuit.

There was this engineer named Boisjoly [Bosco Lee] who was one of the ones who helped prepare some of these slides and said, you can't do this, we have too high a risk of failure. The Thiokol engineers basically take that and they water it down. They call NASA in Huntsville and say we don't recommend launching. NASA called back, or faxed back — this is days of faxes — and said, well, you've never told us not to launch before. What does that have to do with any of this? Sort of a sunk-cost problem. There was all this politics going on. There have been whole books written about this. [Boisjoly] — they actually had a conference call scheduled. They were in the conference call, and it wasn't going very well for the decision not to launch. NASA was trying to push Thiokol, and the Thiokol managers were trying to push their engineers into saying everything was okay. So they finally decided to cut off the conference call and just have the Thiokol managers talk to the engineers. One vice president of Thiokol told [Boisjoly] — I think his name was Bob — hey, go take off your engineer hat and put on your manager's hat. To me, that's — I told you engineering and management are basically the same. You can't take off one hat and put the other on. But they pressured [Boisjoly]. Everybody's telling [Boisjoly], oh don't worry about it Bob, it's no problem, everything's fine.