The Challenger and Whistleblowing

               The root cause of the Challenger disaster was a failure in the sealing rings between the different segments in the rocket booster engine. Houston mission controllers referred to the event at the time as “obviously a major malfunction.” According to the New York Times, “A seal failed on a rocket booster, and the stream of hot gas released by it ignited an external fuel tank… the unusually cold temperatures may have worsened the problem.” Basically, a poorly designed piece of one of the white rocket boosters was ruined by the cold and consequently caused an explosion which killed seven astronauts and disintegrated one of the five operational space shuttles. The more morally important piece of the puzzle was that NASA had been warned by their contractor, Thiokol, that the cold weather would negatively impact the sealing rings, known as O-rings. Motherboard described the situation: “Thiokol described the risk of low temperatures to NASA managers from their headquarters in Utah, and urged NASA to postpone the launch. ‘It isn’t what they wanted to hear…’ Challenger was a go.”

                One of Thiokol’s employees, Roger Boisjoly, had been part of the task force assigned to support NASA’s rocket booster engines. Fully aware that the O-rings would not be able to handle the unusually cold launch temperatures, Boisjoly and his teammates pleaded with their managers to ask NASA to stop the launch. Their concerns were overridden, and the rest was history. Boisjoly took all of the documents he had access to and kept them protected from the government. The Whistleblower Support Fund described Boisjoly’s act of whistleblowing: “Boisjoly met secretly with an NPR reporter shortly after the shuttle disaster to provide information about the problems at [Thiokol].” Thiokol, NASA, and the U.S. government responded by blackballing Boisjoly and keeping him from ever working in the aeronautics industry again. An intense, and ultimately unsuccessful, legal battle ensued.

                Boisjoly did the right thing by blowing the whistle on Thiokol and NASA. Once lives were lost, his actions were necessary to force the involved parties to ultimately change their practices. If Boisjoly hadn’t exposed the unsound engineering decisions which had been made, there is no guarantee that either NASA or Thiokol would have designed a new type of O-ring which enabled safe shuttle flights for the next 17 years. Furthermore, the bad publicity would not have forced cultural changes within NASA which persisted until Columbia. Additionally, the terrible publicity caused great financial challenges for NASA and its contractors. In response, Thiokol fired Boisjoly. While they were financially justified in doing so, they had no moral grounds for doing so. Punishment of Boisjoly was unethical, especially since Thiokol management had acted incredibly unethically by brushing a known and catastrophic design flaw aside. Even though his life wasn’t ruined, he did endure much hardship at Thiokol’s hand. Ultimately, whistleblowing did much good in this situation. Until the Columbia astronauts lost their lives, the forcibly redesigned O-rings and altered business practices very likely saved several lives. Whistleblowing, although painful in the short-term, usually results in long-term benefits for the general public.