Richard C. Cook - Challenger

Challenger

As a Resource Analyst at NASA's Comptroller's Office, Richard C. Cook was responsible for assessing the budgetary implications of the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), External Tank, and Centaur Upper Stage of the Space Shuttle program. In July 1985, Cook performed background research on the SRBs to determine whether any engineering questions would require additional funding that should be included in NASA's next budget. After consulting with engineers in the Office of Space Flight in Washington, D.C., Cook wrote a memo to Michael Mann which summarized some problems with the SRB O-rings:

"There is little question, however, that flight safety has been and is still being compromised by potential failure of the seals, and it is acknowledged that failure during launch would certainly be catastrophic. There is also indication that staff personnel knew of this problem sometime in advance of management's becoming apprised of what was going on."

NASA officials ignored the memo which detailed engineering concerns and warnings from the shuttle builders at Morton Thiokol regarding a potentially catastrophic flaw in the SRB O-rings. On January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its launch, killing all seven of its crew members.

Despite their certainty of O-ring joint inadequacies as early as 1977, NASA launched an investigation to “discover” the cause of the disaster. According to Richard C. Cook, the Reagan administration appointed the Rogers Commission to perpetrate the same cover-up. In response, Cook provided the original O-ring warning documents to the New York Times. The resulting news article initiated a series of disclosures regarding events that led to the disaster, including revelations by Morton Thiokol engineers that they had tried to stop the launch. These reports proved significant in predicting that faulty rubber seals on the solid fuel rockets might trigger a catastrophe, as the official investigations eventually concluded.

Richard C. Cook received the Cavallo Foundation's Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government for helping to uncover the facts about the faulty O-ring seals that led the shuttle's solid rocket boosters to fail. He concludes that rather than an accident, the disaster was the result of NASA's autocratic management style and closed-door decision-making process. Documentation further suggests the Rogers Commission was conceived as part of a cover-up effort, including collusion by some NASA managers, White House operatives and commission head William P. Rogers.

In his memoir and personal investigation, Cook documents technical evidence about violations of launch criteria, and telephone calls between NASA and the White House. He suggests that by focusing solely on equipment malfunctions and internal NASA decision making, the Rogers Commission evaded the most important question: Why was it so important to those in power to launch the shuttle on that particular day?

Though the Rogers Commission denied it, Cook maintains the Reagan Administration pushed hard for NASA to launch shuttle mission 51L against engineers’ recommendations so that "Teacher-in-Space" Christa McAuliffe would be aloft in time for the president's 1986 State of the Union Address. It was likely that Reagan wanted teacher Christine McAuliffe in orbit aboard Challenger so he could speak with her live during his televised speech that night. Cook further suggests that NASA failed to fix the O-ring problem to avoid delaying shuttle flights that were to be launched with military payloads for the U.S. Air Force.