Page 35 - The Social Animal

Conformity 17

cation after the fact. But when they said it, you understand, they
really believed it. 5

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded sec-
onds after launching. Seven astronauts, including a civilian school-
teacher, perished in a fireball of smoke and flames. The decision had
been made to go ahead with the launch despite a near disaster on an
earlier Challenger flight and despite strenuous objections and warn-
ings from knowledgeable engineers about the defective O-rings at
the joints of the booster rockets. Were key National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) administrators ignorant of the dan-
ger or cavalier about the lives of the astronauts? I doubt it.
A more likely explanation involves a number of factors that con-
tributed to flaws in NASA’s decision-making process. First, NASA
had already conducted two dozen successful launches with essentially
the same equipment. With their confidence boosted by previous suc-
cesses, NASA administrators were oriented toward a “go” decision.
Second, NASA officials, like the general public, were caught up in
the enthusiasm surrounding the launching of the first civilian
(schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe) into space.
Further, according to a penetrating analysis by Arie Kruglanski, 6
there were additional, practical reasons for NASA administrators to
be victimized by their own wishful thinking: Given NASA’s need to
secure congressional funding by displaying its efficiency and produc-
tivity, given the intense public interest in the “teacher in space” pro-
gram, given NASA’s wish to demonstrate its technological
capabilities, “liftoff was clearly a more desirable decision than delay.
Any mention of possible system failure would have suggested a need
to spend more money, a conclusion NASA found distasteful in light
of its commitment to costeffectiveness and economy.”
Finally, in this atmosphere of enthusiasm and external pressures,
no one at NASA wanted to be reminded that any kind of accident
was possible, and they weren’t. Unlike NASA administrators, engi-
neers at Morton Thiokol (the company that manufactured the solid
rocket boosters) were not concerned about the political, economic,
and public relations implications of a decision on whether to launch.
All they cared about was whether the damn thing would work—and
given the subfreezing temperatures at the launch site, they objected
strenuously to the launch.