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Challenger space shuttle pbs8/15/2023 ![]() McDonald and his team of Thiokol engineers had strenuously opposed the launch, arguing that freezing overnight temperatures, as low as 18 degrees F, meant that the O-rings at the booster rocket joints would likely stiffen and fail to contain the explosive fuel burning inside the rockets. He had just heard a NASA official completely gloss over a fundamental fact. He was “in the cheap seats in the back” when he raised his hand and spoke. Twelve days after Challenger exploded, McDonald stood up in a closed hearing of a presidential commission investigating the tragedy. “And then afterwards in the aftermath, exposing the cover-up that NASA was engaged in.” “One was on the night before the launch, refusing to sign off on the launch authorization and continuing to argue against it,” Maier says. “There are two ways in which actions were heroic,” recalls Mark Maier, who directs a leadership program at Chapman University and produced a documentary about the Challenger launch decision. Now, 35 years after Challenger, McDonald’s family reports that he died Saturday in Ogden, Utah, after suffering a fall and brain damage. He also told NASA officials, “If anything happens to this launch, I wouldn’t want to be the person that has to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why we launched…. McDonald persistently cited three reasons for a delay: freezing overnight temperatures that could compromise the booster rocket joints ice forming on the launch pad and spacecraft that could damage the orbiter heat tiles at launch and forecast rough seas at the booster rocket recovery site. I just thought we were taking risks we shouldn’t be taking.” ![]() “And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime,” McDonald told me. Refuse to sign, and he’d risk his job, his career, and the good life he’d built for his wife and four children. Sign the form, he believed, and he’d risk the lives of the seven astronauts set to board the spacecraft the next morning. His job was to sign and submit an official form. He was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch of the Challenger “…to approve or disapprove a launch if something came up,” he told me in 2016, 30 years after Challenger exploded. He was responsible for the two massive rockets, filled with explosive fuel, which lifted space shuttles skyward. McDonald directed the booster rocket project at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol. 27, 1986, Allan McDonald stood on the cusp of history.
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