Acting NASA administrator William Graham says he wants to meet with Sen. Ernest Hollings (D., S.C.), who has called for Graham`s resignation for allegedly misleading a Senate subcommittee investigating the Challenger shuttle explosion about mechanical failures on a previous launch in cold weather.
Hollings also told reporters Thursday that Graham was ”in over his head” and was ”losing credibility,” and he said the choice to launch was
”a high-level political decision made despite objections from engineers at Morton Thiokol,” the Chicago-based firm that made the doomed shuttle`s solid- fuel booster rockets.
Graham said he is ”willing to answer any questions” that Hollings might have about the Jan. 28 disaster, in which all seven crew members of the space shuttle were killed.
On Friday, members of the presidential commission investigating the accident were in Florida, Alabama and Utah as a prelude to two days of public hearings next week.
The investigation of the Challenger explosion continued to focus more directly on whether human error was as much to blame as mechanical failure for the explosion.
In other developments:
— Members of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science and Technology had a secretive session in Washington that included a telephone hookup discussion with a Morton Thiokol Inc. engineer, Allan McDonald, who had vigorously protested launching the Challenger in such cold weather.
— A Morton Thiokol official in Chicago defended the company`s ultimate decision to recommend the launch of Challenger despite opposition from a number of the firm`s engineers. He said the decision was made just 30 minutes after the company originally recommended against the launch. Another Morton Thiokol employee described details of the launch discussion that indicated NASA pressured the company to agree to a launch. NASA released a copy of the Morton Thiokol approval signed by the company`s vice president for space booster programs, Joseph C. Kilminster.
Hollings made his charges based on private talks he had Wednesday with McDonald, Morton Thiokol`s chief on-site engineer at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. He said McDonald offered him evidence that contradicted Graham`s testimony before the subcommittee.
Hollings said he requested that McDonald testify in public, but said the Republican-dominated subcommittee decided to keep Thursday`s session private. Senators clustered in a conference room and talked with McDonald over a telephone hookup. McDonald was at an undisclosed location in the Russell Senate Office Building to avoid media attention.
According to Hollings, McDonald told him Wednesday that a possible O-ring rupture occurred on a shuttle flight on Jan. 24, 1985, when a small puff of black smoke appeared near the solid-rocket booster at liftoff of the shuttle Discovery. A similar suspicious puff of black smoke, which scientists say may have been a ruptured O-ring, appeared from Challenger`s right solid-rocket booster just seconds into its ill-fated launch Jan. 28.
The O-rings are two critical rubberlike seals used between segments of the solid-fuel booster rockets to contain pressure caused by the burning solid-rocket fuel.
Temperatures on the days of those two launches were the lowest in which a shuttle launch has been attempted, 53 degrees Fahrenheit in the case of Discovery and 38 degrees in the case of Challenger.
Hollings said he was angry because Graham had told the subcommittee that the ”evidence was otherwise” when asked whether a ”black puff of smoke”
problem had occurred on previous missions.
In a statement Thursday, Graham denied that he misled the committee, saying that he could not provide a simple ”yes” or ”no” answer to so complex a question. He said he would meet with Hollings at any time and at any place to discuss the issue.
To bolster his argument, Graham also released a copy of the document in which Morton Thiokol officials formally agreed to proceed with the launch. The document outlines several reservations, but citing the successful Discovery launch in cold weather, ultimately recommends a launch of the doomed vehicle. For instance, the Morton Thiokol document indicates the company believed that if the primary O-ring did not seal, possibly because of the cold, then the secondary O-ring would position itself properly and prevent a burn-through of the fuel`s 5,800-degree rocket flame. Sources on the presidential commission say it has all but been concluded that such a burn-through, caused by a seal that became rigid in the cold weather, had led to the disaster.
In Chicago, Morton Thiokol officials released a statement summarizing their version of the controversial meetings and telephone conference calls on Jan. 27 that led to the launch decision.
At first, the contractor had recommended against launch, but then changed its position 30 minutes later, according to company spokesman Thomas Russell. During the 30-minute interlude, Russell said, company officials reconsidered data relating to the correlation between launch temperatures and erosion of O- rings during earlier shuttle flights.
Russell said the decision to recommend the launch was made unanimously by four top officials at Morton Thiokol`s plant in Promentory Point, Utah, where the boosters are manufactured.
Russell said he was told by company officials that one NASA executive whom he did not identify said he ”was appalled” by Morton Thiokol`s initial decision to recommend against a launch because of cold weather.
”When you hear `my God` and the word `appalled,` you immediately think of pressure. If someone uses the word appalled or says they are appalled by a decision, that`s sometimes used as a shock technique,” Russell said.
Another Morton Thiokol employee who insisted he could not be identified said the NASA official also at one point said ”my God, Thiokol, when do you want us to launch this thing. In April?”
He also said the context of the meeting included Morton Thiokol initially presenting its reasons why Challenger should not be launched, and a NASA challenge of the Morton Thiokol data.
”When it became clear we had done our work, our judgment was questioned,” he said.
In an interview, however, Russell defended Morton Thiokol`s ultimate decision to approve the launch, while admitting some of the firm`s engineers had problems with the position.
”I feel very good about who was assigned to make the decision. They are our senior people and they`re good. After considering all the data they had a logical rationale for the launch. Unfortunately, not all our people supported the decision, but the right people made the decision,” Russell said.
Russell also said the scenario of the meetings that led to the decision to launch provided to the presidential investigating commission earlier by McDonald was ”one-sided. And I think he is expressing his reservations now a lot stronger than he did to us at the time (of the meetings). As a matter of fact, I don`t think his concerns got to our people anywhere near the way he`s voicing them now, if at all.”
While Hollings and the senators were working their way through McDonald`s comments and Morton Thiokol was issuing its statement in Chicago, members of the presidential commission were dispatched to major space agency centers to interview those who took part in the decision-making process the commission already has says ”may have been flawed.”
One group went to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where many key personnel in the launch decision process are based. High-ranking Marshall officials have consistently refused to comment on the investigation.
Commission vice chairman Neil Armstrong asserted during the visit to Huntsville that there may not have been a breakdown in communications in the NASA chain of command before launch. The presidential commission had released information Wednesday showing at least three NASA executives involved in the decision to launch were not aware some Morton Thiokol engineers strongly opposed firing the rockets–reservations they expressed during the pre-launch meeting Jan. 27.
”It may well be within the proper prerogatives of the people who made the decisions to make the decisions they made without passing additional information on,” said Armstrong, a former astronaut and the first person to set foot on the moon.
”We`ll be exploring that area next week (in public hearings) and it`s not my province to pass judgment on that at this point,” said Armstrong, who was accompanied by commission member Maj. Gen. Donald Kutyna of the Air Force. Meanwhile, commission members were expected to tour the Morton Thiokol plant in Promontory Point and speak with engineers involved in the project on Friday.
In the wake of reports that high-level Morton Thiokol employees approved the launch despite vehement objections from their own engineers regarding the dangers, Peter Knudson, mayor of nearby Brigham City, Utah, said Thursday in an interview that he believes NASA ”pressured” the contractor to go along with the scheduled launch.
Knudson said that he has spoken with Morton Thiokol employees ”very close” to those involved in last-minute conversations with NASA regarding the launch.
”There was nudging. You can say nudging. You can say bullying. I`ve come away with a strong feeling there was pressure applied,” he said.
”Perhaps there was some type of arm-twisting. It`s my gut feeling with talking with people, their expressions have led me to think that`s what happened.”
Though NASA officials at Cape Canaveral would not confirm which members of the presidential commission were meeting in Florida, Charles Redmond, a NASA spokesman in Washington, said he ”presumed” Robert Hotz and astronaut Sally Ride were at the Kennedy Space Center Thursday.
W. Cecil Houston, Marshall Space Flight Center`s resident manager at the Kennedy Space Center, confirmed Thursday that he was scheduled to be interviewed at Cape Canaveral Thursday or Friday by presidential commission members investigating the cause of Challenger`s explosion.
Houston was one of five people at the Kennedy Space Center involved in the late-night telephone conference call on the eve of Challenger`s launch.
According to the source, Lawrence Mulloy, head of NASA`s solid-rocket booster project at Marshall, was at the meeting and objected to the engineers` concerns being voiced so close to the launch deadline.
”One comment made during the conference by Mulloy was, `This is awfully late in the game to be coming up with this kind of information,` ” recalled the source, who asked not to be identified. ”Time was of the essence. We were within two hours of starting to load the fuel tank. There was pressure on.”
According to Redmond, the commission is now focusing its investigation on the details of the Jan. 27 discussions and any other conversations about weather concerns that NASA had with Morton Thiokol representatives.
”Everything the commission will do next week will focus on the conversations between Mulloy et al and Kilminster et al,” Redmond said.
