Jeff (4:31)

Yeah. How did the shuttle differ from what Americans had seen before when it came to space travel?

Miles O'Brien (4:39)

The idea was to build something that could fly to space, return, and with very light maintenance and refurbishment. Go back, you know, initially, when they first proposed it in the late 70s, the idea was to fly, you know, a couple of times a week, if and maybe more. And so they designed a system that was fully reusable. It was a two craft system. One was called a flyback booster, which essentially would piggyback the spacecraft to a high altitude. And then the crew aboard that piggyback craft would fly back, return to a landing strip, and the spacecraft would continue onward, perform its mission, land on a Runway and get right back to work after a couple of days of refurbishment, not unlike a 737 airliner. That was the goal, to make it that easy and affordable to get to space. But along the way, because of cost cutting, because of design requirements that were imposed upon NASA by the Pentagon, and because of just the laws of Physics. What came out of that design process was very much a hybrid of that original idea of fully reusability. It was never anything that could be turned around that quickly. And it never came anywhere close to being affordable and an inexpensive way to get there.

Jeff (6:13)

Well, as you mentioned, millions of school children were watching this launch all around the country. You happened to be there that day, set the scene for us. What was it like?

Miles O'Brien (6:22)

Well, I wasn't quite there, but I was close enough. You have to remember this was a record cold snap in Florida. 100 year record. I had spent, I was a 26 year old green reporter working in local news in Tampa, Florida and I had spent the entire night in a citrus grove doing live reports with a grower who was worried about losing his crops because of the bitter cold. It was down in the teens and in Florida that's something that people, people remember. And after a full night of work I went to sleep and was awakened by the assignment editor at my station saying the shuttle has exploded. And I couldn't even process that. And I went outside in my house, at my house in Tampa and I looked up in this incredibly impossibly blue sky and I could see the remnants of the contrail of Challenger. And it was like a big giant Y in the sky. I mean this is 150 miles away. And it just kind of hung there like a pall over the state and the city. And so I got busy doing the local news assignment. But it's hard to overstate how much of a shock this was to the country up until that time. NASA, despite the fact that it had a terrible accident in 1967, the Apollo 1 accident, where three crew members were incinerated on a launch pad during a test. But that was out of public view. This was something everyone saw instantly. It was broadcast live on CNN and the world watched it and children were connected to it. And there was a profound sense of loss of innocence I think for NASA, which at that point really in the public's mind could do no wrong.

Jeff (8:20)

A loss of innocence for NASA? I mean, did it feel like the nation and the world in mourning in real time? What was the immediate aftermath like?

Miles O'Brien (8:29)

Yeah, it was appall. And you know, Ronald Reagan was supposed to deliver his State of the Union address that night and for a time he thought they thought they would press on and actually give that address. But eventually they canceled the State of the Union and instead he gave an oval office speech that was, it was authored by his famous speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, which was classic Reagan really in A poetic way. He at one point quoted the famous poem High Flight, which was written by a Canadian fighter pilot back in the 1950s. And ending it with the crew touching the face of God. It was. This was a nation in mourning. There was not a dry eye in the nation, if you will. And it was a collective tragedy that I think at that point only rivaled the assassination of jfk.

Jeff (9:30)

And as a result of that tragedy, there was a presidential commission that was launched to investigate what happened. It was known as the Rogers Commission. And the result was that NASA knew about a potentially catastrophic flaw, but failed to address this. Tell us more about that.

Miles O'Brien (9:44)

Yes, William Rogers, former Secretary of State, former Attorney General, not anybody who knew much about space, but certainly knew about politics and being inside the Beltway, led this commission on it. He had people like Neil Armstrong, he had Sally Ride, Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, who played a very critical role. And for a time, NASA and the prime contractor that built those solid rocket boosters, Morton Thiol out of Utah, did a pretty good job at stonewalling and obfuscating what really happened. And eventually, some of the senior engineers at Thiol, who were really deeply concerned about the fundamental problem with their solid rocket booster, testified to the fact that there had been repeated cases of near misses in the joints which connected those solid rocket booster pieces together. The solid rocket boosters had sections which were actually the size of a rail car so it could be transported from Utah to Florida. And those connections had a couple of rubber O rings all the way around them to ensure that the hot gases that were flowing through the rocket itself didn't leak out. And they had determined over several flights, including notably almost exactly a year before the Challenger flight on a flight of Discovery, that those hot gases that were inside there were leaking through those O rings. And if they ever got all the way through and caused a hot jet to be exposed and toward the orbiter itself, it would, in fact, be catastrophic. On that Discovery mission, which happened to be yet another very cold day a year prior, the hot gases very nearly escaped. And those engineers from Thiokol realized they had a system that was fundamentally designed poorly. Those solid rocket boosters were based on intercontinental ballistic missiles. And when it was adapted for the shuttle, no one really looked at that design carefully and wondered if there might be a problem, particularly in cold weather, because, as it turns out, those rubber O rings were not. Well, they became like bricks below, really, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And the fact that they had had 24 successful launches was somewhat luck, somewhat, because they probably they weren't launching during cold weather events, but NASA knew about this and was had come to the conclusion, the completely wrong conclusion, almost like, almost like Russian roulette, that we got past it the last time. Therefore, that means it's going to be okay. This is a manageable risk that we can deal with. But in fact, what it was was a term which the sociologist Diane Vaughn coined called the normalization of deviance. The fact that they had had all these near misses led them to precisely the opposite conclusion, that they were safe because they had gotten away with it, when in fact the system was crying out that there was a fundamental design flaw here. And NASA covered it up. The night before the launch, those thiocol engineers got on a teleconference and when they saw the weather forecast which put the temperatures well below freezing at the launch pad, I mean, the launch pad was covered in ice. It was like a scene from Dr. Zhivago. And they got on a teleconference. These are the contractors in Utah with the mission managers for NASA in both Huntsville, Alabama and at the Cape, and pleaded with them not to launch, that they had the data, they were working on a redesign, and it was imprudent to launch at that temperature. And this was an agency that was determined to prove that the shuttle was going to live up to its public relations and the pitch it put before the public and had a really terrible case of go fever and wanted to get those 15 launches on the books. And so they pressed on for launch. And to call that. Well, you know, there would be some who would suggest it was criminal behavior because they knew go fever is a.

Jeff (14:26)

Great way to describe that. I was going to ask you if, you know, contractors of NASA felt comfortable cutting corners because there was so much attention around this launch and that they felt it felt like they had to keep it on, on schedule. What did, what did accountability look like?

Miles O'Brien (14:40)

Well, eventually the Rogers commission came up with its conclusions. And, you know, there was wholesale changes in management at NASA from the top on down and in the shuttle program itself. You know, interestingly though, as is often the case, the whistleblowers in this case, Alan McDonald and Roger Boigelet, the two lead Thiocol engineers who were doing all that pleading, they were scapegoated. And for a period of time, Thiokal tried to marginalize them and push them out of their careers. And it actually required some public statements by William Rogers himself to get their careers somewhat back on track. But in the end, they were vilified by their own people and Their own organizations and the people who made those decisions while they were reassigned and lost their direct responsibility for the shuttle program, there were no further consequences. So in the end, it's just, it's a sad statement that they could be so callous about the human lives in which they were entrusted. But there was a certain amount of magical thinking within NASA. There's a great quote in the Rogers Commission report from Feynman, Richard Feynman, the famous and provocative physicist, which I'll read to you, and it kind of sums it up. During the hearing, they had a little sample of that rubber O ring and Feynman, you know, there's a lot of engineering gobbledygook going back and forth. And Feynman had a great way of cutting through the nonsense. He had a cup of ice water and he dropped the, that piece of O ring into the ice water for a few moments and pulled it out. And as he removed the clamp that was attached to it, didn't spring back. It remained in place. And in that one picture and one moment, everyone knew exactly what happened. But he wrote an appendix to the report because he felt like that. He felt Rogers pulled his punches a little bit. Appendix F, he said, for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations. For nature cannot be fooled. NASA was trying to fool nature. It had believed its own public relations about the reliability, the commercial viability of the shuttle and was determined to prove it against all evidence to the contrary. And, and in so doing, seven lives were lost. And that hubris, that magical thinking to me is it's more than just human error. There's something more insidious there.

Jeff (17:37)

For those working inside the agency at the time, did the Challenger tragedy, did that create a culture of fear or did it in many ways create a culture of resolve?

Miles O'Brien (17:50)

It's interesting, Jeff, changing cultures in a big organization, a bureaucratic organization like NASA, which is involved in such a high risk enterprise, changing those cultures is a huge, huge challenge. In an organization which after all has sort of almost a paramilitary chain of command, how do you make it possible for lower level people to surface problems to the top in a way that it doesn't get stamped down by mid level people along the way? That's a real challenge. And unfortunately, that is something that. I'm sure we can talk about this in a moment. That's something that became quite evident in the loss of Columbia in 2003. In that case, again, mid level people with knowledge not getting that information to the top where action could be taken. Frankly, it was a Lot of lip service. After Challenger, there were some fundamental redesigns to the system itself. That solid rocket booster, those seams got changed so that it was not a vulnerability like it was before. The main engines, which had been quite problematic and they had dodged bullets on that one, were redesigned as well. There was a crew escape system of some kind installed. And that was another fundamental problem with the shuttle design. It didn't have a crew escape system. But changing that culture, while NASA expressed a public stance that it was doing better, I'm convinced that, well, the proof is in the loss of Columbia that it really never changed.

Jeff (19:27)

And the Columbia tragedy was 17 years after the Challenger explosion and Columbia disintegrated upon re entry, as you said back in 2003, killing all seven astronauts. You covered that during a marathon, what was it, 16 hour coverage for CNN. What was that like?

Miles O'Brien (19:48)

Well, there were a lot of things going on in my brain at that time, including kind of parenthetically I was CNN and I were about to announce, probably would have happened just a week or so after the successful ending of Columbia, had it happened, that I was going to fly on the shuttle to the International Space Station. I had been working on a deal for many years with NASA and CNN and had finally come to terms with the agency that I would fly to the space station on a 10 day mission. And so that of course that morning, that Saturday morning when Columbia was streaking across the United States and was lost, number one, I knew that was immediately over. But number two, I also immediately knew what happened. And this is where the parallels to the O Rings and Challenger come in. I was there for the launch of Columbia on January 16th and everyone there, including me, saw this huge foam strike. The external fuel tank, filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen was covered in an insulating foam. And the idea was to keep it from being iced over on the launch pad. But from day one, when that shuttle launched from the pad, pieces of foam would fall off the external fuel tank. And no one at NASA, no engineer at NASA ever took it upon themselves to do a real engineering analysis of this. The foam would strike, there would be minor damage to tiles and the team would make draw the conclusion that foam was just a maintenance issue, not a safety issue, that foam was too light to be a threat to the crew. Well, this is a direct parallel to what was happening with O Rings in Challenger. They knew about the foam. The foam was happening. They never really explored it. They decided in their head without really getting the numbers, that the foam was not a problem. Well, we Saw this really large foam strike on the left wing, the leading edge of Columbia. It was the size of a briefcase. And I went back to the truck, the satellite truck that we were broadcasting from at cnn, and we played the film over and over again. And I called all my sources in the program, including the head of the program himself, Ron Didmore, and asked him about it because it seemed just, you know, looking at it, it looked like a big problem. And to a person, they dismissed it. They said, oh, it's just foam. It's light. It's like a cooler blowing off a pickup truck on the freeway. It looks bad, but it doesn't do any harm. And what had happened was there were people inside NASA pushing as hard as they could, trying to get upper management of the space shuttle program to ask the national security agencies, the three letter groups that run spy satellites, to take a picture of the shuttle in orbit to see if there was damage to that wing. And those requests were rebuffed repeatedly. And again, it was the same kind of thing. It's a parallel to Roger, Roger Beaujolais and Alan McDonnell on the eve of the launch of Challenger. The upper management did not respond to it. They did not recognize the real threat that it was. And for hubris, or out of embarrassment for having to ask another agency to use a spy satellite, never requested that those images be taken. And so no one knew for sure what happened. But when they came in and disintegrated, I immediately knew that that's what it was. It just hit me like a ton of bricks that that had to be what it was. That foam had created a huge hole in the leading edge of the wing. And the shuttle airframe was made of aluminum and it was covered with thousands of protective silica tiles. And on the leading edge of the wing and the nose cone where it got hottest, this material was called reinforced carbon. Carbon which was designed to shed the searing heat of re entry away from the aluminum. And there was a big hole there which melted the aluminum and destroyed the vehicle. And it again, was something that really could have been avoided if the team had not really kind of in a systematic way, ignored something that was screaming out at them as a problem.

Jeff (24:49)

I mean, it's remarkable to hear you say that a single picture from a satellite could have changed the course of history, frankly, and saved those lives after the.

Miles O'Brien (24:59)

Well, it's, you know, I will confess to you, Jeff, it's a bit of a stretch, right? If they had trained that camera on the first day of this 16 day mission and seeing the Whole, what could they have done right? Could they have launched a rescue mission? Well, the shuttle Discovery was on the launch pad at the time of the launch of Columbia. And it would have been possible, potentially, I mean, perhaps on the edge of probability or possibility to have done that, to have launched another shuttle to transfer the crew out and return them to Earth. You could have potentially put the crew of Columbia in a kind of quiescent mode, have them get into long sleep cycles, not do any work to preserve consumables. And it is maybe fanciful thinking, but I'm convinced NASA would have tried. They also could have potentially tried to reenter in a different way, which would have tried to protect that left wing as long as possible so that the breakup could have occurred perhaps at a lower altitude, an altitude where they could have bailed out. All of these things are on the edge of possibility. But I'm convinced if that picture was taken and the world saw the hole in that wing, NASA would have tried something. They wouldn't have just said to the crew, we're sorry, thank you for your service, and, and said goodbye to them. They would have tried desperately to try to save that crew. And so that idea that that opportunity was missed is hard to. Well, it's poignant, certainly, for the managers who made the decision not to get that picture taken, but it is, you know, for me, it's a journalistic lesson. I was told, oh, don't worry about the foam, and I moved on to the next story. But I do believe that if I had run a story on CNN the next day about the foam strike, there would have been a lot more pressure on that team to do something. It's a journalistic lesson, I guess, on how much we accept what we hear from trusted sources. And when the head of the shuttle program and people down the chain who are even closer to the imagery and to the. The thermal protection system, who I all knew well, tell you not to worry about it. What was I supposed to do as a reporter? But maybe that's a story that I should have done.

Jeff (27:30)

Yeah. Well, it speaks to technical failures that are compounded by leadership failures and organizational failures all within the agency at the time. And the Columbia disaster brought about the end of the shuttle program because it was in 2004 when then President George W. Bush said. Said that the shuttle program would be retired after the completion of the International Space Station. Did the shuttle program ever meet up to its promise?

Miles O'Brien (28:00)

You mentioned the space station. You cannot write the history of the shuttle without that. If you go way back to the beginning, Wernher von Braun and the rocket scientists from Germany who were successful in Designing the Saturn 5 and sending the US to the moon in 1969 for the first time. Their vision of what would happen after Apollo was quite grandiose, as you might suspect. It included an orbiting space station, nuclear powered rockets that would take human beings to Mars, a moon base with rockets that would be used as space tugs, and a space shuttle, a shuttle that would be primarily responsible for building and maintaining the space station. Well, subsequent to Apollo, when budgets were being cut in the 1970s and the Nixon administration had no desire to spend the kind of money that was spent in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on space, which after all was kind of a blank check, NASA sort of had to pick one. And the only one of those ideas that would ensure NASA would continue to fly in space was the shuttle. So it flew for quite some time without really its primary mission being actualized, because there was no space station budget or desire to build the space station until the Clinton administration. And it wasn't until the early 90s that the international Space Station idea came to light. And suddenly the space shuttle had a mission. And even though it was deeply flawed and people were very much aware of its vulnerability and how delicate a system it frankly was, the idea of building the space station was something that NASA pursued along with support from the Clinton administration at the time, was very concerned in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Russian rocket scientists wouldn't go off and be working for the likes of North Korea or others to build ICBMs. And so the International Space Station, which was as much about geopolitics keeping the Russian space science enterprise intact. And thus the idea of this multination space station came to be, and sort of against all odds when you consider a partnership with the Russians, after all the Cold War rivalries and all the problems with the shuttle system that were still really there, that station was built on the back primarily of the space shuttle system. And so you have to, you have to say that the space station is a huge achievement in space, but also for geopolitics that 16 plus nations came together and built this object in space that brought astronauts together from various nations. That is an accomplishment. But ultimately, in the end, many of the technologies that were deployed on the shuttle ultimately were proven. Well, I guess they became kind of technological dead ends.

Jeff (31:38)

I have to ask, that agreement you had with NASA to travel to the International Space Station before the Columbia disaster, was that your one and only opportunity?

Miles O'Brien (31:49)

Well, you know, I don't know, I'm still kicking, right? I'm tanned, I'm rested, I'm ready. No, I, I don't think that that certainly what I imagined doing, Jeff, which was a 10 day mission to the space station and telling the story of the shuttle program. That idea of going to the space station, that's gone because the space station is in its latter years now. And there's no real desire to put a journalist on a Dragon capsule that NASA has procured from SpaceX. So I don't think that's going to happen.

Jeff (32:26)

The shift toward NASA working with private companies, how profound a change was that for the space industry?

Miles O'Brien (32:33)

Well, it's been significant in so many ways. It's worth pointing out that NASA never built a rocket on its own. There were always contractors involved. These contracts were like Pentagon contracts, so called cost plus contracts where the contractor would build to the tight specifications of NASA as the client, with them supervising every step of the way. And then whatever it cost, they were guaranteed their profit in the contract. And this is why Pentagon weapon systems are so expensive. And that's why the shuttle program ultimately became economically not viable. So the idea shifted toward moving this toward a different kind of contracting where private enterprise would build the rockets, maintain much more autonomy about the process, own the intellectual property, and NASA would be like the anchor tenant or the prime client for using that service. And this was something that had origins in the Obama administration and really started actually to give credit during George W. Bush's administration, after the decision was made to retire the shuttle fleet. And eventually companies emerged, most notably among them SpaceX, led by Elon Musk to first, under these different kind of contract rules, fly cargo and eventually people to the International Space Station. And the idea was that SpaceX would have the autonomy to sell seats to the highest bidder for other missions to use the rockets and the propulsion system that they developed to chart its own business. And as it happens, that has drastically reduced the cost of getting to space like an order of magnitude. And so it's hard to say to overstate what a game changer that is for the space economy. It's interesting because it's become a real business now, but it probably wouldn't have happened if it hadn't started with some billionaires who had just a keen interest in space. I'm talking about Richard Branson and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Now the business is real. I'm here in New Zealand about to go to Antarctica, but today I'm going to go visit a company called Rocket Lab, which has now launched more than 50 payloads to space successfully. These are small payloads, but it's now cheap enough to get to space because of the reusability of rockets and the way systems are designed now and the fact that the need for huge satellites to do jobs is different. You can make satellites much smaller now. And that has dramatically changed the space business. And Rocket Lab is a publicly traded company that is out of New Zealand of all places, that has had huge success and is now building in Virginia at a launch site called Wallops that NASA has run for years, is now building a rocket which approaches the payload of a Falcon 9. And it will be built with the intent that humans eventually could ride on it. And so that is like a real business not started by a billionaire and is proving, I think, that this business now, this business of getting to low Earth orbit is a real business and doesn't require an interested billionaire to make it all work. So it required initially NASA to make the decision to let out contracts in a different way that stood up SpaceX. It required billionaires who were fascinated with space and colonizing Mars. And now there are people and entities in the game that are doing this on its own economic merits. And so we're kind of at this point now where, where access to space seems to be a real business. And that's an exciting thing for the future because what this means is it just gives us as much as anything a better way of taking a look back at our favorite planet. After all, Earth with sensing devices, safety systems, detection for wildfires, tracking the weather and climate change. All of these things really put space far beyond the idea of gold plated bungee jumps for rich tourists, but offering space up as a way of making life better here, which is very exciting.

Jeff (37:41)

We started our conversation by talking about how the Challenger project was seen as this project of national prestige. What happens when national prestige and private profit become intertwined in space exploration?

Miles O'Brien (37:58)

Yeah, it's risky business, isn't it? Right? When you give that much control away. But the flip side of it is that maybe giving that much autonomy and distributing it beyond the strict bureaucracy that is NASA, maybe inherently in all of that there is an element of safety. Look at the amazing safety record of Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule which flies human beings. It's a very safe system and fundamentally it is designed in a way that is safer. Jeff the shuttle never had any sort of really viable crew escape system. And that was an early decision for cost and made the shuttle system inherently a very dangerous system. The SpaceX Falcon 9 dragon system puts the capsule on top of the stack. And so, number one, there's nothing that's going to fall on it from the rest of the vehicle, like the foam fell on the orbiter Columbia. But also it has a crew escape system, actually a rocket that is attached to the capsule itself, which can separate the entire capsule from the rocket stack if something really bad happens during the launch sequence. So that's an inherently much more safe system. So in the end, what has come out of, you know, the post shuttle years are through a lot of hard lessons learned is a system which I think is more robust and ultimately safe. And frankly, when you look at NASA's record, it doesn't have a good record when it comes to safety. 14 shuttle crew members lost their lives in a program where there were all these fanciful ideas of reliability, like an airliner. And it wasn't ever going to be that way. And NASA did not prove that it could take safety to heart as it produced launch vehicles. In the course of cost cutting and redesigning and building a system in that government cost plus environment, it built a system which was inherently unsafe and was never going to meet the public relations promises that it gave the country. I think that this idea of going back to cost plus government contracts is by no means a panacea and by no means an assurance that there will be greater safety or efficiency. It might be to the contrary.

Jeff (40:57)

Miles, we always learn so much when we speak with you. That's why we wanted to have you on this podcast and, and in all the time we've shared the screen on the NewsHour talking about matters of science and space. I never asked you what sparked your interest in space travel.

Miles O'Brien (41:11)

You know, it's interesting. I grew up, I am the son of a pilot. I am the grandson of two pilots, general aviation pilots. I grew up as a boy in the right seat of small airplanes with my father flying, learning how to navigate and not being able to see over the instrument panel and learning how to fly on the instruments and was just captivated by it. And of course, I am one of the lucky people, Jeff, that grew up and was able to witness the moon landings and to watch the moon race unfold as a boy, just, I guess I was sprinkled with a little bit of moon dust. But my generation was, when I think about, you know, the quirk of timing, that I was born in 1959 and was able to watch that all unfold as I grew up combining my love of aviation with watching those magical events happen, I guess it's just a, you know, a stroke of faith that I was born at this time and had that interest. But I, you know, I consider myself, you know, I got the bug early. I got the space bug very early and I just kept pursuing it.

Jeff (42:34)

We're going to have to give you a new middle name. Miles Moondust o'. Brien.

Miles O'Brien (42:38)

I like it.

Jeff (42:40)

Miles, always great to speak with you, friend. Thanks for making time for us.

Miles O'Brien (42:43)

You're welcome, Jeff. It was a pleasure.

Patient (42:54)

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Pharmacist (43:06)

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Patient (43:51)

My doctor about epi and if Creon could help.