The Rogers Commission failed; questions it never asked, answers it didn't listen to.

• Author: Cook, Richard
• Position: Challenger accident

THE ROGERS COMMISSION FAILED

The praise was nearly unanimous for the commission set up by President Reagan to investigate the Challenger accident. "The Rogers Commission --The Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident--has served the country well,' The Washington Post editorialized on June 10, the day after the report's release. "The Rogers Commission and its chairman have performed with unusual thoroughness and speed. Their report is a model of rigor, clarity and fairness,' wrote The New York

Times. William Rogers was "a leader who measured up to the tough job,' trumpeted USA Today.

The report painstakingly documented the immediate cause of the accident--failure of an Oring joint. It concluded that engineers' concerns about the cold weather were not relayed to those who made the final decision to launch because of a failure of communication. With some statements pointedly critical of NASA, the commission assured the public that it had thoroughly examined the blemishes of this long-revered agency. It stated, for example, that there was "a serious flaw in the decision-making process leading up to the launch.'

But the Rogers Commission was also truly "flawed.' The commission's final report absolves high NASA officials of any direct responsibility for the accident. Yet it ignores substantial evidence--some of it presented to the commission privately and some of it at public hearings--that those officials were fully aware of the long history of problems that led to the explosion. The commission left unchallenged statements by NASA officials that were contradictory and often obfuscatory. Indeed, at times the commission seemed to be coaching NASA witnesses on how to deal with tough public questions. On the key question of why the final decision to launch was made, the commission ignored so many suspicious coincidences and left so many questions unanswered that further investigations will undoubtedly be needed.

To the commission's credit, much of the information we now know about the launch and NASA's internal problems came out in the course of commission hearings, though much of it had already appeared in the press through news leaks. But the extent to which the commission avoided drawing obvious conclusions and asking obvious questions suggested by that evidence is remarkable. As James Beggs, the former administrator of NASA said in a recent interview with The Washington Monthly, the commission "looked at it from the bottom up but not from the top down.'

"Not adversarial'

President Reagan's choice to chair the investigative commission was William Rogers, attorney general for President Eisenhower and secretary of state for President Nixon. Although Rogers had been in politics and government for three decades, he was known mostly for his capacity to quietly tolerate being passed over by President Nixon on important foreign policy issues. Rogers is a practicing attorney who one represented Lockheed, the company that coordinates the assembly of the shuttle. "We are not going to conduct this investigation in a manner which would be unfairly critical of NASA,' Rogers said when the commission was announced, "because we think, I certainly think NASA has done an excellent job, and I think the American people do.'

The selection of the commission's other members was equally questionable. Even though the commission was created to investigate NASA, its members were chosen by NASA. Acting administrator William Graham, according to the Orlando Sentinel, nominated commission members, most of whom were accepted by President Reagan. They were worthy choices in that most were familiar with space flight. But one might have wondered how aggressive the commission could be when seven of its 13 members had direct ties to NASA: an astronaut, a former astronaut, a consultant to NASA, a designer of the shuttle engine, the former director of the Pentagon's shuttle program, and an executive of one of the companies that serves as a subcontractor to NASA.

Of course, given the importance of the task at hand, it was entirely possible that this group would actively pursue the truth, regardless of how it might reflect on the space agency. The true test of its success was in how it investigated both the decision to launch the Challenger and the history of problems with the O-rings.

By February 6, the start of the commission's hearings, NASA's own internal investigation had already focused on O-rings as a probable cause of the accident, according to press reports at the time. But in that first hearing, NASA's top officials made no mention of the O-rings as a probable cause of the accident. Acting Administrator William Graham stated simply that "NASA continues to analyze the system design and data, and as we do, you can be certain that NASA will provide you with its complete and total cooperation.' Associate Administrator Jesse Moore-- the man who made the final decision to launch--said that in their search for a cause of the accident, "the status as of today, [is] we have reviewed some data, and our analysis does continue.' He said that prior to the launch, his only specific concern was that low temperatures might affect the water systems on the launch pad, including those that allow technicians to wash out their eyes.

Judson Lovingood, deputy director of the shuttle projects office, told the commission that there had in the past been O-ring anomalies, but they had been "thoroughly worked' and that there had never been a case in which both primary and secondary O-rings had eroded. Arnold Aldrich, the national space transportation system director from Houston, one of the top officials involved in the shuttle, testified that "we had no concern for the performance or safety of the flight articles [orbiters, boosters, main engines, or fuel tanks] at that time, nor do I even at this time.'

The next day, in a closed hearing the transcripts of which recently became public, NASA officials began to discuss their knowledge of the history of O-ring problems. Aldrich, the number-two man on the shuttle launch chain of command, told the commission that O-ring erosion "has been in discussion in the program at least during the last year' and that the worst case of erosion occurred in a cold weather launch a year earlier. On February 9, The New York Times published a story, based in part on a memo I had written seven months earlier, describing the history of O-ring erosion. The memo cited engineers' concerns at NASA headquarters that flight safety was being compromised by potentially catastrophic O-ring in-flight erosion. The Times mentioned several other supporting documents, including NASA analyses of the O-ring charring and engineers' reports stating that the back-up O-ring could not be relied upon. The documents showed the O-ring problems had been discussed at all levels of the agency. As it turned out, these were just the first sheets in a long paper trail of evidence that top NASA officials knew about O-ring problems.

With such news, one might...