JonDouglas
Senior Member
- Location
- New England
A man of some courage, Allan McDonald, passed on recently.
You may not know that Allan was the one who refused to sign off on the Challenger launch, saying it was too dangerous with the weather conditions. He was the man responsible for the two huge rockets that were to put the shuttle into orbit and put his job and reputation on the line by refusing to OK the launch. The higher up political types overruled him based on political pressure from NASA, Challenger was launched and then blew up due to the exact problem McDonald said could happen.
In hearings later on, he injected himself into the investigation to stop an attempted coverup. If you were unaware, government bureaucracies are quite prone to coverups and CYA actions. As a result of his testimony, Allan was demoted and set aside by Morton Thiokol, probably based on political pressure but nobody was talking. It took some political counter action, threatening to cancel Thiokol's contracts, for Allan to get his job back. He succeeded in redesigning the rocket's joints, which worked satisfactorily thereafter.
You may not know that Allan was the one who refused to sign off on the Challenger launch, saying it was too dangerous with the weather conditions. He was the man responsible for the two huge rockets that were to put the shuttle into orbit and put his job and reputation on the line by refusing to OK the launch. The higher up political types overruled him based on political pressure from NASA, Challenger was launched and then blew up due to the exact problem McDonald said could happen.
In hearings later on, he injected himself into the investigation to stop an attempted coverup. If you were unaware, government bureaucracies are quite prone to coverups and CYA actions. As a result of his testimony, Allan was demoted and set aside by Morton Thiokol, probably based on political pressure but nobody was talking. It took some political counter action, threatening to cancel Thiokol's contracts, for Allan to get his job back. He succeeded in redesigning the rocket's joints, which worked satisfactorily thereafter.
