On January 28th, 1986, seven astronauts lost their lives in the one of countries worse shuttle accidents. The space shuttle, Challenger, exploded minutes after takeoff. The main reason of the explosion was discovered to be a failure of the O-Ring in the solid rocket booster to seal properly. There were many factors of the O-Ring not closing properly; insufficient testing of the O-Rings in low temperature, faulty design, lack of communication, weather, political pressure, etc.
The design of the space shuttle was assigned to a company call Morton-Thiokol. The O-Ring problem was discovered in the previous shuttle launches and was addressed with the launch of the Challenger. At first two engineers form Morton-Thiokol recommended not to launch but their recommendation wear not heard and upper management took the decisions to with launch because they wanted to stay on the good side of NASA. Even on the day of the launch, NASA was warned about the defect but NASA also chose not to listen.
The main ethical issue in the case of Space Shuttle Challenger is lack respect towards engineers and their recommendations. Everyone involved was concerned losing their jobs or contracts. Morton-Thiokol was concerned about losing their contracts from NASA. NASA was worried about the government the pressure that was building in the space wars that was going at the particular time frame.
To handle this ethical issue I would seriously blow the whistle on Morton-Thiokol, even if it meant that I am was going to lose my job as an engineer. A life is not more important than ones job. The managers at that company were engineers before and forgot their duty as an engineer. They were too concerned about their contract and their reputation. But then again, one question comes to my mind, what happens when NASA does not want to listen? They too had pressure from above because the US was competing against the Russians.
2 comments:
This was a more than a disaster in more ways than one. Bottom line, no regard for the lives of the astronauts and their families. I too believe that I would have blown the whistle on Morton-Thiokol. I think that they all, NASA and the government are to blame.
Sorry for taking so long time to respond to this blog, I feel that this was not only Morton-Thiokol fault but great points you bring smitty; I feel that everyone who didn’t do anything to protect human lives such as NASA managers whose main concern was economic considerations, political pressures, and scheduling backlogs, they put all these factors before human lives. When is it ok for us as human being to put more emphasis on trying to be the best at anything like competition instead of realizing that human live are priceless and valuable? I feel in this article that NASA was ethically obligated to the people they trained to venture out on that space shuttle, these people I believe had the most confidence in NASA and that they would be returning home safely and NASA didn’t bring these people home to their family because their main concern was beating the European Space Agency. One person I feel that was ethically wrong here besides Jerald Mason is Larry Mulloy because he challenged the engineers' decision not to launch, Jerald Mason encouraged Lund to reassess his decision not to launch, I feel that if they listen to Lund these astronauts would never had met that kind of fate.
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