17
Berson
“The Challenger to be Ethical”
by:
Kymber Berson
English 401
Professor Ron Strickland
December 6, 2002
Kymber Berson
English 401
Dr. Strickland
Final Paper
The Challenger to be Ethical
No matter what area of work Americans are employed in today, most likely there will be technical communication responsibilities. Where this responsibility used to be reserved for those people specifically trained to deal with technical communication, it seems that today, everyone is a technical communicator. “We marvel at the latest computers, bring even more complex systems into our homes and job sites, agonize over the legal and ethical consequences of medical technology, and debate the environmental impact of agricultural technology” (Pattrow and Wresch 4). If so many people are becoming technical communicators, we need to have exceptional communication about technology to ensure we are making ethical decisions.
In an article published in the Wisenet Journal, Jean Hollis Weber wrote about the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own actions. She discussed a regular ethics column run by The Society for Technical Communication (STC) in its national newsletter. The column’s purpose is to describe a typical situation that could happen in the workplace and then propose different possible solutions. Readers are invited to choose which options they would go along with or propose an original solution. STC publishes the responses in a later issue. What Weber said stood out as a result from these polls is “the dichotomy between knowing what’s right and wrong and applying that in situations where your job, or possibly even your life could be placed in jeopardy if you do the ‘right’ thing (Weber 2). It is the duty of a technical communicator to make ethical decisions and take responsibility for any decisions that are made. This does not mean hiding behind what is legal, or requested; it is not ethically acceptable to say Joe Somebody told me to, I was only following orders, that’s not really my job, etc. “Emerging technologies mean that the law often is well behind the times; but we must make choices now, not wait for the law to catch up” (Weber 2).
Some think that when there are discussions about ethics in technical areas, the only concerns are making sure not to plagiarize, but there are many more ethical dilemmas technical communicators face. In Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray, Lori Allen and Dan Voss start with a simple definition of ethics, “…doing what is right to achieve what is good” (5). The problem is that everyone can create their own definition of what right means and what good means. Following personal ethical concerns in the workplace that necessitate disagreeing with the team can be difficult. Even when conflicting concerns are presented, it can also be difficult to communicate well enough to convince colleagues to change their minds. If the team has different ideas about the main goal of the job is, (or what is good) they might not be communicating effectively to reach the same end result. What happens if an employee or employees of a team are unable to communicate well enough to convince the rest of their colleagues that there is a problem? In the case of the Space Shuttle Challenger this failure to communicate lead to a disaster resulting in the loss of seven innocent lives. These seven astronauts put their trust into NASA/the Marshal Space Flight Center, and Morton-Thiokol, but because these teams could not communicate efficiently, the mission of the Challenger shuttle ended in disaster.
It was shortly before noon on the morning of January 28, 1986. The eyes of the nation were on seven professional astronauts who were about to take flight on the Space Shuttle Challenger. One of these astronauts, Christa McAuliffe, caused special attention to this flight. Not only was she the payload specialist, McAuliffe was the first school teacher-astronaut, causing millions of school children to turn their attention to the Challenger. The morning was colder than any other launch in history, 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Flight 51-L lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:39 a.m.
Within milliseconds of ignition, gasses from the right solid rocket booster began poring through a loose joint between sections of the booster. After one second into flight, smoke was visible and by 58 seconds flames were visible as well. At 65 seconds cryogenic liquid hydrogen rushed from the tank onto the burring gasses from the rocket; the shuttle began to break apart at 72 seconds. At 73.124 seconds the hydrogen tank exploded which caused disintegration of the intertank and liquid oxygen tank. The Challenger exploded in a huge white fireball (Presidential Commission, 1986).
The shock of this event, experienced by such a great number of people, brought the nation together to grieve and question what had gone so wrong. The media played and replayed these final seconds described above of the Challenger and its passengers from the launch, to the final seconds of the explosion, and then the aftermath. We saw the anguished faces of onlookers, adults and children alike, and then the investigation of the Presidential Commission. This was an event that could not simply be called an accident and let go. The disaster has mainly been called and remembered as a technical failure, but technology is not the only culprit. Examining the communication that preceded this event, it can be concluded there is more to this disaster. Had communication been more efficient during the years, months, days, and even hours preceding liftoff, this dreadful disaster could have been avoided.
When the Presidential Commission, also called Rogers Commission, began their investigation, it was troubling to learn that a problem with the 0-rings was noticed and mentioned back in 1977. One problem was that while different teams worked on the Challenger, they did not consider their roles of communication as important as their roles in the production of the shuttle and getting it off the ground. Morton-Thiokol worked on the Challenger’s Solid Rocket Motor (SRM) and Marshal Space Center/NASA was the consumer.
Engineers at the Marshal Space Flight Center had questioned the design of the solid rocket booster Morton-Thiokol was designing all along. Marshal was put in charge of supervising the work of Morton-Thiokol, the independent contractors out of Utah hired to design the SRM. “The engineers at Marshal were especially worried about the joint being designed by Morton-Thiokol to connect sections of the solid rocket booster” (Pattow and Wresch 2). Leon Ray, one Marshal engineer, put his concern in writing and called the joint unacceptable along with his request for redesign. His reasons for redesign request were “1) the gap created by excess tang-clevis movement causes the primary 0-ring seal to function in a way that violates industry and government 0-ring application practices; 2) excessive tang-clevis movement allows the secondary 0-ring to become completely disengaged from its sealing surface on the tang” (Pattow and Wresch 2).
Despite this concern in writing, Morton-Thiokol still received the contract to build the solid rocket booster and did not redesign the joint in query. At 1:00 pm on January 27, 1986, NASA’s personnel at Cape Canaveral, Florida became concerned with the weather predicted for the launch of the Challenger the following morning. Abnormally cold weather was expected, dipping into the low 20’s. According to The Challenger Launch Decision, by Dianne Vaughan, the SRM manager at Marshal, Larry Wear, had contacted Morton-Thiokol to discuss the issue of the cold whether. He asked that the engineers review all of the possible effects the cold whether could have on the SRM. After Wear’s call a meeting was held at the Utah plant to discuss the concern. At this meeting the Thiokol engineers expressed their concern and said that with the cold temperature the 0-rings would harden and would not be able to seal the joints against the hot gasses created at ignition. The engineers agreed that this problem would increase the amount of erosion and threaten mission safety.
What happened next was a three-location teleconference at 5:45 pm EST on the same evening of January 27, 1986. Participating were managers and engineers at Morton-Thiokol, Marshal Space Flight Center, and Kennedy Space Center. Thiokol engineers acknowledged that the shuttle launch should be delayed until at least noon to see if the temperature warmed up at all. No one who had the power to do so gave the okay to delay the flight. Instead, the decision was made to have a second conference call later that evening so that more personnel at all three locations could be included in the discussion. The second call was scheduled to take place at 8:15 pm EST. Engineers at Thiokol prepared thirteen charts that explained the danger of launching the Challenger the following morning in the extreme cold. Prior to the second teleconference, and without much time, the charts were finished and faxed to NASA for review.
The second teleconference went as scheduled, now with thirty-four engineers and managers from Marshal and Thiokol. Engineers in Utah’s main argument opposing the planned launch was once again repeated; the 0-rings’ ability to seal the booster joints at ignition would be slower with the dramatic weather. If the booster joints did not seal then the hot gasses would be sent upwards and could damage the secondary 0-ring as well. After back and forth arguments against the launch by engineers and for the launch by the managers challenging the objections, Thiokol Vice President, Joe Kilminster requested a “five-minute off-line caucus for Thiokol managers and engineers in Utah” (Vaughan 6). This was a strange occurrence for the engineers at Morton-Thiokol. Usually the role of the producer, Morton-Thiokol, was to defend and push the product they were producing. On this night pushing a ‘sale’ forward was not the case; engineers at Morton-Thiokol were being much more cautious and wanted to delay the flight. The five minutes turned into thirty and the phones stayed on mute with the other personnel standing by.
It seems that during this private aspect of the conference call the engineers were unable to convince the management of the danger involved with launching on such a cold morning. Jerry Mason, Thiokol Senior Vice President said, ‘We have to make a management decision,’ thus excluding Thiokol engineers from the decision-making” (Vaughan 6). According to Vaughn what happened next was a three to one vote in favor of launch the next morning as scheduled. Hesitant, was Thiokol Vice President of Engineering, Robert Lund. Mason asked him to “take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.” This pressure, or maybe knowing he could not convince management to change their minds was enough to influence Lund; he voted in favor of the launch. Back on line, the teleconference ended at approximately 11:15 pm EST with the recommendation from management to launch as scheduled the following morning.
With the history of the tragedy laid out, who was responsible for this disaster? There were warning signs, but was that enough? There has never been only one cause pinned on the fatal disaster, but for many reasons there was a breakdown of communication. “There was political and economic pressure to launch; there was pressure to launch because of media attention to the teacher in space; there was considerable human fatigue from overwork immediately prior to the flight” (Pattow and Wresch 3). Even with extreme pressure to launch, it is daunting to think that the management was more concerned with the punctuality of the launch then they were with making an ethical decision. There have been arguments made that the responsibility of the disaster is fully the fault of the management teams; another researcher found fault in the thirteen technical graphs made by the Thiokol engineers.
The researcher who states that flaws in technical communication contributed to the Space Shuttle Disaster is Edward R. Tufte, and in his book Visual Explanations, he discusses what some of the problems were with the technical charts sent over to NASA on the night of the teleconference. His research demonstrates how important the quality of technical information communicated is. The first problem Tufte points out is that the charts prepared do not include the names of the personnel who created them. He gives good rationale for the importance of this missing information in a technical report and uses the lack of this information to explain why initial credibility might have been lost for the engineers arguing to hold off on the launch.
“All too often, such documentation is absent from corporate and government reports. Public, named authorship indicates responsibility, both to the immediate audience and for the long-term record. Readers can follow up and communicate with a named source. Readers can also recall what they know about the author’s reputation and credibility. And so even a title-chart, if it lacks appropriate documentation, might well provoke some doubts about the evidence to come” (Tufte 40).
Another chart that was prepared by the Thiokol engineers explained the immediate risk to the shuttle by showing that previous launches had eroded 0-rings on the shuttles. The way the engineers had gained this evidence was by examining the 0-rings retrieved from passed launches. Tufte asserted that the information provided, while some sounded serious, did not appear to be catastrophic, and therefore did not help make their case about the extreme danger that would be involved. Further, the technical evidence did not include any information that stated the cause of past erosion problems was due to the cold temperature. The engineers repeated this concern verbally, but did not make a clear connection in the technical data.