The Lab · 27 January 1986 · A conference call, the night before launch
The Challenger launch decision: would you have signed?
What do you sign?
The case
Told from where the person who decided stood. In the game each line is written into a drawing as you tap.
- You are a senior manager at the company that builds the space shuttle’s booster rockets. The launch is tomorrow morning.
- Tonight will be far colder than any launch so far. The coldest was at 53 degrees, and its rubber seals came back damaged.
- Your engineers say cold makes the seals stiff. Their advice is in writing: do not launch below 53 degrees.
- The space agency pushes back hard. The data does not prove a launch is unsafe. The flight has slipped already. It wants your signature.
The two calls
- No launch.Hold until it is warmer. You cannot prove you were right, and your biggest customer is angry.
- Go.The data proves nothing. Your engineers still say no.
Make the call in the game Free. No account. Two minutes.
What happened
The managers signed. They reversed their engineers’ advice, and the engineers went on objecting.
Four managers decided alone. An engineer who had objected said he was never asked. One manager, he recalled, was told to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.
Challenger launched in the cold on 28 January 1986. A booster seal failed. 73 seconds later the shuttle broke apart, and all seven of the crew died.
The inquiry called the decision flawed: the people who gave the final word did not know the engineers had objected.
Source: Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986). Report, vol. 1, ch. V: “The contributing cause of the accident”. www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm
How to read this
History is not an answer key. This page says what was done and what came of it. Whether it was right is the question the case leaves with you.
Where the game asks it
The same kind of question runs through The Hospital (What risks will you accept?), one of the nine journeys of the game.
More from The Lab
- The Tuskegee study and Peter Buxtun: stay inside, or go to the press?
- The Stanford prison experiment: would you have stopped it?
- Frances Kelsey and thalidomide: approve it, or ask again?
All the rooms: the case files