The Effects Of Negative Reinforcement
Running Head: The Challenger Disaster. Dollar versus Quality
The Challenger Disaster. Dollar versus Quality
In order to understand why the Challenger disaster occurred, we need to understand certain technical aspects of the shuttle and the launch. The basic structure of the shuttle consists of three main parts: the solid rocket boosters, the external fuel tank, and the orbiter (the shuttle itself). The solid rocket boosters are comprised of several segments connected by rubber seals called O-rings that prevent hot gases from leaking during liftoff. If hot gases were to leak from the seals, the high pressure of the gas escaping could puncture the external fuel tank, which contains 1.6 million pounds of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. This, in turn, would cause a massive explosion. Therefore, engineers used two O-rings per joint for redundancy in case the first O-ring failed. O-rings were held to the joint with putty, which should have protected them from the hot gases. A loss in the integrity of the O-rings would pose a serious threat to the shuttle and the crew members.
Ultimately, the failure of the O-rings caused the Challenger explosion--but why did they fail? Looking back, the O-ring failure should not have come as a big surprise to engineers and NASA managers. NASA documents as early as 1979 indicate slight uncertainty about the O-rings' efficacy. By 1984, though, O-ring anomalies began to surface on more than 50 percent of the shuttle's flights (Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, v.1 p. 155). Wiley Bunn, director of Reliability and Quality Assurance at NASA, Marshall, indicated to the Presidential Commission that communication problems may have contributed to the oversight:
I agree with you from my purview in quality, but we had that data. It was a matter of assembling that data and looking at it in the proper fashion. Had we done that, the data just...
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