The Questions Get Tougher

The painstaking search for the cause of the world's worst space disaster shifted dramatically, and distressingly, in tone last week. After 24 successful space-shuttle flights, the explosion of Challenger and the loss of its seven crew members had been widely viewed as a tragic but virtually inevitable cost of pioneering on the high frontier of space. As it one day must, so it was said, ill fortune had finally overtaken the methodical, ever cautious, technological wizards of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Declared President Reagan on that fateful day: "It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery; it's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons."

Across the nation, there was vast public sympathy for NASA's sorrowful officials as they began seeking the accident's cause. "We grieve at NASA," said Jesse Moore, its associate administrator for space flight. "We grieve every day." A presidential commission headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers opened its investigation with a protective attitude toward NASA. Rogers even publicly badgered an internal critic of NASA's safety standards about his competence to criticize. Surely it would eventually be found that, despite NASA's elaborate precautions, some technical aberration had caused the tragedy.

But by last week the atmosphere, and NASA's image, had changed. After declaring that NASA's procedure for deciding whether to launch Challenger "may have been flawed," Rogers demanded that no NASA official involved in that decision take further part in the space agency's own investigation. And word leaked out that Rogers had told the White House he had been "appalled" by the way the launch decision had been made. At a public hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings said of the disaster: "At this particular juncture it seems like an avoidable accident rather than an unavoidable one." Later he charged that it was becoming "increasingly apparent that NASA made a high-level, political decision to go ahead with a morning launch of the shuttle, despite strong objections from Morton Thiokol engineers, who said the temperature was far too cold for a safe launch."

Even the authoritative and generally pro-NASA trade journal Aviation Week & Space Technology was critical. While praising the "dedication, high level of effort and in many cases personal sacrifice" of NASA personnel, it charged that "undercurrents reveal a hidebound space agency fraught with lax management oversight, intramural turf battles between headquarters and key field centers and a tendency toward compartmentalized bureaucratic thinking that, in the aftermath of the accident, has generated self-serving responses."