Allan McDonald - An ethical engineer.

This guy has been one of my heroes for years. I lived in Titusville for a while and watched the Shuttle launch about 5 or 6 times.

He absolutely made the right call and I applaud him for doing it.
 
Morgan3820 said:
Management, the real enemy.
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Nah - McDonald himself was in “management, but not senior management although he rose to the VP level at Thiokol before he retired. Rather, it is the spineless, penciled-neck bureaucrats that are the real source of poor decision making. You know the ones I am talking about - they sniff the air like a hunting dog trying to figure out what decision makes the most political sense for them, and for whatever reason, have abandoned any pretense of any understanding of what is right and wrong, whether in a moral, legal or ethical sense. Unfortunately, NASA was full of these kind of people at that time of the Challenger accident largely because of the top-down drive that resulted in political appointments way too deep into the organization. The list of federal agencies that were at one time by law commanded to be driven by science or technology like NASA and were instead converted to being driven by politics is unfortunately long. Similarly, many state and local governmental agencies (all politics are local) are full of these kinds of people as are many corporations. That is in part why the painful lessons we learn from events like the Challenger seem to have to be relearned every 10-15 years. Government agencies and corporations have no memories.
 
Jumpmaster said:
... Government agencies and corporations have no memories.
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sure they do. They remember some successes. But they are completely ignorant of why anything was successful.
 
Daleandee said:
I well remember seeing this event as I stood in unbelief. It is said the McDonald took the news very hard.

An astounding thing about this is that it's believed that the crew may have survived until the capsule impacted the water at ~200 mph.

https://gawker.com/thirty-years-ago-the-challenger-crew-plunged-alive-and-1755727930

I'm still very saddened by this even though it's been a number of years ago ...
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I was one of the millions of school kids watching in class.
 
Unfortunately engineers are forced to make decisions like this more than they should. And the people who overrode him probably still think they were right.
 
This article was the first time I had heard of him in this regard. Roger Boisjoly was the one I was familiar with.
 
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