229: Find Courage to Speak When It Matters Most, with Allan McDonald

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:42]:

30 years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched with the 1st teacher in space onboard. 73 seconds into flight, it exploded. I was a child, and I remember watching the custodian of our school lowering the flag to half staff that cold January morning. In the 3 decades that have passed since the accident, most of us have seen the video again and again of the accident on January 28, 1986. But I wonder if you know what happened the night of January 27th, the evening before. On a special show today, I welcome the 1 person who officially refused to sign off on the launch of Challenger and his lessons for all of us on leadership and ethics. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 229.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:00]:

Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show will give you access to the best thinkers, resources and actions to develop your leadership skills. And I’m really glad that you tuned in for today’s show because when I first met this week’s guest in person a year ago, I was immediately captivated by his story, and I knew it was one that I wanted the Coaching for Leaders community to hear. And what many of you know is that NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, 30 years ago, and, of course, the resulting accident that happened just moments after the spacecraft launched. What you may not know was that there were warnings against doing so for many individuals, including my guest today, Al McDonald.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:03]:

Al, as he sought to draw attention to the real reasons behind the disaster, was singled out retribution by his employer. And he not only accurately diagnosed the problem with the troubled boosters joints, but also a failure in management that led to the demise of Challenger. As a result of his efforts, he ended up being instrumental in implementing the sweeping changes that markedly improved the safety of future space shuttle missions. He published a book in 2009 titled Truth, Lies and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster with doctor James R. Hansen. And, Al, when you and I were talking before we had this conversation today. I mentioned that I was in elementary school at the time this accident happened. And outside of a couple of extended family members who passed away when I was a child, this is the moment that I remember that really put a sense of of shock, but also grief into something that happened as a child, and it’s one of the first times I really, remember experiencing grief, and it it was really an accident that that captivated the world attention, and I’m really grateful for your time in in joining us today and sharing your story.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:22]:

Maybe you could set the stage for us, not only for where the space program was in early 1986, but also your role with Morton Thiokol, Al, and and how you were involved specifically with the shuttle program.

Allan McDonald [00:05:35]:

Ok. Well, I actually had come into the shuttle program, just a couple years before the accident, 1984, under some rather unusual circumstances because we had a big accident at the plant, Morton Thiokol, that I worked at. Well, we burned up part of the, shuttle facilities, and we’re very fortunate we didn’t lose a bunch of people because of that accident. And, as a result of the accident investigation, I was called in and told that I was now gonna be the new director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project. Certainly had more on my plate than I had ever anticipated. It also was, unique to me because I had spent my prior 25 years up to that time in various facets of engineering, from design, to running laboratory, to project engineers.

Allan McDonald [00:06:28]:

And so this is my 1st assignment as a program manager. And I quickly realized after I started doing that job for a very short period of time, that a program manager’s plate, his hat, is much larger than engineers. Not only has to worry about all the engineering problems and issues that are being worked, they have to worry about schedules and costs and budgets, customer relations, and all of those things are on a program manager’s plate. And, we were going along, fairly well except we were looking forward to NASA’s, new schedule, which they were at that time proposing that they were gonna start flying space shuttles at a rate of 2 per month, 24 per year by the end of probably 1988. So when we got into 1986, it more than doubled the flight rate from the previous year. And they’re gonna double it again almost. So it was a tremendous lot of pressure on the agency, to perform with all of the components and all those shuttle systems to get them up into even a production rate to meet that, much less turnaround the shuttle as much as fast as they could. And that became, part of the problem with the launch of the space shuttle Challenger on that cold morning of January 28th because the prior launch, which actually had, congressman Bill Nelson from Florida, who is now a senator, I believe, was on that launch, and it had suffered the most delays at any space shuttle launch prior to that time.

Allan McDonald [00:08:15]:

In fact, it was like 6 or 7 delays. Was actually supposed to fly about a week before Christmas, and the media was just absolutely merciless on NASA. They’d publish things like, you know, NASA’s showing they’re out budget here in a couple years they’re gonna fly 2 of these shuttles a month. And they couldn’t even get one of them off the launch pad after it was declared to go within a month. And so that brought a lot of pressure, obviously, to all the folks down at the Cape because now we had another shuttle launch scheduled, the Challenger for January, which meant that we could get 2 launches off in January. And, that added some added schedule pressure to make sure we got this one off, but it wasn’t clean either. It actually suffered 2 delays prior to the planned launch of the 28th of January.

Allan McDonald [00:09:15]:

And the prior delay, just before that, was due to some very strong ground winds that prevented the vehicle from being launched because they exceeded the constraints for the, return to launch site, and so it got postponed to the next day. I remember leaving the launch control center and going to my friend in Titusville. I wasn’t there for about an hour, and I got a phone call from 1 of the fellows that work for me and that, you know, Al, we were just informed that there’s a meteorologist in Orlando just announced that these strong ground winds that we experienced today, right behind it, is a real cold front moving to the Cape, and it could be as cold as 18 degrees Fahrenheit by tomorrow morning at the opening of the launch window. And I said, good grief. I’m really worried that our o-ring seals and our fuel joints will operate properly at those kind of temperatures.

Allan McDonald [00:10:08]:

He said yes, our engineers are too.And the reason I called you is that they want you to find out from NASA what the actual forecast hour by hour is at the launch site, not in Orlando, so that we can predict the actual temperatures on our hardware at the opening of the launch window tomorrow morning.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:27]:

This was on January 27th, so the the day before the accident. So you’re in this relatively new job as a program manager. There’s unbelievable pressure from all kinds of different stakeholders for the shuttle program to stay on schedule. And that’s when you learn about this, the the the weather factor that was going on that day. And why is why was the cold temperature such a factor in such a concern for you when you found out about that?

Allan McDonald [00:10:53]:

Well, it was, a real concern because, I quickly remembered that 1 year ago in January of 1985, just 1 year before that, we pulled a couple of these 2 boosters out of the ocean after a flight. And when we pulled them apart, we noticed that a joint in each booster, both of them had evidence of black soot trapped between the 2 o-rings. There’s 2 o rings in these joints because it’s such a critical function. It has to have redundancy. So there’s 2 o-rings. What that indicated was that some hot gas got past the 1st 0-ring and stopped by the second one. And it was A fairly large quantity of black soot, fairly penetrating in the joint. In fact, it went most of the way around this big joint which is 12 feet in diameter.

Allan McDonald [00:11:49]:

And we couldn’t understand why we saw this in these 2 joints. We went back to all of the, records of the build up and the fabrication thinking maybe with some tolerance problems or something. And the only thing we found that was different from any other flight that we had flown was that that was the coldest launch that we had ever seen up to that time. And we’ve calculated that the joint at that time it was launched was at 53 degrees Fahrenheit. And I remember making the flight readiness review for the next launch convincing NASA while it was still safe to launch. I had actually clipped out an article in the Orlando Sentinel, which said that that launch that we saw this observation was preceded by the 3 coldest days in all of Florida history in over a 100 years of records. It actually got down into the teens for 3 consecutive nights before the launch.

Allan McDonald [00:12:51]:

And I said, we obviously aren’t gonna see this again, certainly not in April, which was that time the next scheduled launch. And so everybody felt comfortable that that was a unique condition, but it certainly was scary because we knew that came too close to not only losing all the safety factor in that joint, but actually could be catastrophic if the 2nd o-ring ever got passed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:16]:

The temperature factor was strongly suspected to be a a a huge factor in whether or not the joints failed. And so this brings us back to the night before the accident then, January 27th, and you hearing that weather report. And take us there and tell us what happened after you went and found more of the information about the weather and what conversations happened with NASA that evening.

Allan McDonald [00:13:43]:

Well, once I, I realized that we needed to get this information to our engineers on the predicted temperatures, I obtained that and sent it to them and told them that they need to take that information along with whatever information they have and put together a presentation for that evening that I would arrange on a teleconference tying our engineers in with the engineers at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and also management of NASA Kennedy Space Center, where I was at. I said, now I want you to to, analyze it the best you can, but at the end, I want the actual vice president of engineering to make a recommendation, what is the coldest temperature that it is safe to launch? And that ought to be the bottom line. I did arrange that meeting. We were on the teleconference. In fact, almost all the charts were handwritten. Engineers didn’t even have time to type them. And the engineers that prepared them, were the ones that, gave it over the teleconference. They had faxed these charts to every location so people could look at them and, at the end of the presentation, the vice president of engineering came on, fellow by the name of mister Bob Lund, and he said based on the presentation that we’ve given here, this evening by my engineering staff, I would not recommend that we launch the space shuttle below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, which was clearly the threshold that we had seen a year earlier that scared us somewhat, and I was absolutely shocked at NASA’s response to that.

Allan McDonald [00:15:31]:

They challenged the basis for such a strict recommendation. They said, gee, that’s really only based on some qualitative observation. You haven’t presented any hard test data that says it won’t operate properly or some hard analysis. I was absolutely amazed that they challenged that recommendation. In fact, the head of the, solid rocket booster project at Marshall, his name is Larry Malloy, said my god, April. What would my god say? When do you want me to launch? Next April? And which was a very intimidating statement.

Allan McDonald [00:16:07]:

And and then he said, you know, the eve of a launch is a hell of a time to be creating new launch commit criteria. And so he asked, his fellow at Huntsville, the deputy director of science and engineering, a fellow by the name of George Hardy, what his position was. And he basically said that, he was appalled that Thiokol could make such a recommendation based on information we presented that evening. But that he would not go against the contractor’s recommendation. And then the head of the shuttle’s project office, who was also at the gate with me, a fellow by the name a Stanley Reinhart, and he was responsible for all of the elements from Marshall. The external tank, the solid rocket boosters, and the Space shuttle main engines. He said, well, he thinks that that recommendation certainly is not consistent. But what he understood the SOD rocket boosters are supposed to be qualified for, which he understood it was supposed to be from 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which by the way I agreed with.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:13]:

Just so people don’t miss the number, you all were recommending a benchmark of 53. How cold did it actually get on the launch pad that night?

Allan McDonald [00:17:20]:

Well, that night, it got down to the low twenties, about 20, 21 degrees. And I thought it was you know, his comment was correct, but it’s kind of a mute point because they’re asking us based on the predicted temperatures at the launch site. It was gonna be at the opening of launch window someplace between 22 and 26 degrees Fahrenheit. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 40 is the, upper. That wasn’t applied either. So.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:46]:

Yeah. It’s not a it’s not a degree or two. We’re talking about a huge difference.

Allan McDonald [00:17:49]:

No, it is not a degree or two. We’re not here that close where you could move it a few degrees one way or the other. We’re still long ways away.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:55]:

What happened with this conversation? So so you both in Thiokol, your your company, the contractor in charge of solid rocket boosters was in in one place with 1 recommendation, and the shuttle management was in another place. What happened?

Allan McDonald [00:18:09]:

What evolved from that discussion was what I didn’t want to happen, and that is that finally, the the NASA management asked my boss, who was the vice president of space booster programs, fellow by the name of Joe Kilmister, what his position was. As I indicated earlier, I wanted this to be a an engineering recommendation based on a technical merits only. And he basically said, well, you know, he can’t go against the engineering recommendation, but he said, we’ll go back and revisit our analysis and what information was presented, make sure that we have included everything that we have available because there were some implication that maybe we only presented reasons and data that says why it might be a concern, but didn’t provide any data we may have said that might not be a concern. And so we’ll go back and revisit that and we’ll take about 5 minutes, offline on mute to make sure that we presented everything we have. And he did that. And that 5 minutes turned into about 30 minutes. And, I was thoroughly convinced myself of what they’re doing is that they’re trying to run some analysis to see if they could go lower than 53. So they would have some analytical basis along with the, qualitative observation that you got criticized for to support some number.

Allan McDonald [00:19:37]:

But my guess was they were gonna try to support maybe going down as far as 40, which in from a real launch, for tomorrow, probably wouldn’t impact it, but it certainly could impact whether they delay one day or 2 days or something.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:52]:

Yeah. So you’re at the Kennedy Space Center, and they’re all having this conversation back in Utah if I’m recalling correctly. And and you’re just waiting to see what happens when they come back on the line and what the recommendation is that comes back with. Once the conversation did resume and your people in Utah came back on the line. What happened?

Allan McDonald [00:20:12]:

Well, the first thing that happened with which kind of took me aback was that it wasn’t the vice president of engineering coming back on the line who had made the recommendation in the 1st place. It was my boss, The vice president of space booster programs and program management, Phil Kimmister. And he basically came back and said they had revisited everything and had concluded that it was okay to proceed on with the launch as planned. No specific temperature at all. And that really took me aback a little bit because I didn’t quite understand that because he didn’t present any real information. It was much different than what we had discussed before I went offline to support that. And it was clear that NASA got the answer they wanted. And George Hardig immediately came and said, well, you know, you need to put that in writing, which was also very unusual, had never been done before in a shuttle program, and sign have it signed by a responsible Thiokol official.

Allan McDonald [00:21:11]:

And that’s when, as I said in my book, I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime. I knew who that official was. That was me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:19]:

That was gonna be you.

Allan McDonald [00:21:20]:

I refused to sign it. And because I refused to sign it, my boss back in Utah, Joe Kilmanstray, had to sign it and fax it down to me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:31]:

I mean, at this point, it’s the middle of the night. I mean, the launch is literally hours away. They essentially come to you in the middle of the night with this document and say, sign this document. You refuse. What was going through your head at the moment that you said I’m not signing it?

Allan McDonald [00:21:47]:

Well, I concluded that we’re taking risks that we shouldn’t have to take and that we could avoid that risk by just delaying a day or 2 at most, probably just 1, we didn’t have to pull a shell apart or anything. And that would take care of that risk because I knew that the engineers, as well as myself, did not know when this would get to such a temperature that it would not operate properly at all. But we were heading towards that cliff someplace. We didn’t know where it was. We didn’t know whether it was 10 degrees away or 50 degrees away. But we knew that it was going in the wrong direction, and it wasn’t worth taking that risk. So I was so upset by that decision. And it took a a long time for the signed facts to come down that I argued with the NASA officials that first of all, they couldn’t even accept the recommendation because they know as well as I do that that recommendation is outside with those motors are qualified fly in, and they can’t even accept that. It’s against protocol.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:02]:

So ultimately, your boss signed it. The shuttle launched on schedule the next morning, and we all know what happened. And, unfortunately, the catastrophe that you and many others thought could be the cliff as you mentioned was exactly what happened to Challenger. What happened to you afterwards as the investigation unfolded. What happened?

Allan McDonald [00:23:28]:

I had went immediately to the Marshall Space Flight Center the day after the launch to be part of the failure team. I had went through what they did ahead of that time and frankly convinced myself that the only thing that did not fail or caused the failure with the solid rocket boosters because they were the only thing that kept flying after the accident occurred when it exploded.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:53]:

Oh, so you thought it was something else initially?

Allan McDonald [00:23:56]:

I thought it was either the space shuttle main engine, turbine blades around at 40,000 RPM, one of them finally came loose because they had observed cracks in some of them. And, that would have caused that kind of explosion or the tank itself structure had some problem because that’s where all explosion was from the external tank, the liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen getting together. It wasn’t until later that day when one of the fellows at the Cape happened to be actually the director of science and engineering from the Marshall Space Flight Center, fellow named Jim Kingsbury, I called in and said they just reviewed the film and saw fire coming out of the side of the solid rocket booster. And I was actually, leaving the what they call the HOSP, the Huntsville Operation Support Center where they had this failure team at trying to get an airplane and go home. And I was called back by mister Larry Malloy saying I need to get in the conference room and, because they have some films down there and claimed that this fire coming outside the solid rocket booster. And I just basically told him, you tell mister Kingsbury, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s even talking about.

Allan McDonald [00:25:08]:

The solid rocket flying around with fire coming outside of them, they explode. They blow up. So I went back in and I said, you sure that this fire’s coming out of the solid rocket booster, not the external tank? Oh, yeah. We’re absolutely sure it’s coming out booster. I said, could it be coming of a field joint? And he’s, well, I don’t know. He says, coming out in the area, you know, where close to where the solid rocket boosters are attached to the external tank.

Allan McDonald [00:25:39]:

I said, yes. That’s exactly an area of the aft field joint. And right then, my heart about dropped because I realized that that was a joint failure, but I couldn’t comprehend how it could happened that late in in the flight, 73 seconds after ignition.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:59]:

I think I saw you or saw it in writing that It it just it didn’t even cross your mind that it was the r-rings. Even though you had predicted that there that could be an issue, even though you had been the one who most most visibly and officially, you know, put up the objection to the launch that ultimately, you had to be convinced that it was really that that actually brought the shuttle down.

Allan McDonald [00:26:23]:

Yes. I did. Because I was convinced that if it really failed due to the o-rings not seating properly, it would happen at ignition and that the whole thing would probably explode before it cleared the tower. That didn’t happen. So I asked them if they looked at any of the film of the lift off. And I said, go get the cameras looking right at what you think you see this fire coming out the side. He called me back shortly and said, well, the camera was looking that area. It was froze up.

Allan McDonald [00:26:54]:

It didn’t have any film. I said, well, go find the next one that’s closest. And when he called back then, he said, yeah. We can see a big puff of black smoke coming out of that joint. I said, is it around 6 tenths of a second? He said, yeah. Between 6 tenths and 7 tenths of a second. Then I knew that the actual initial failure was exactly what we were concerned about. It just manifested itself into a final failure that we hadn’t projected.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:23]:

And it’s a famous photo, and I’ve scene at many times, and I’m sure many of people in the audience have as well. I mean, there’s just so many complex and and fascinating things that revolve around the incidents that led to the the accident. And what really captivates me about your story, Al, is what happened to you afterwards. Because, ultimately, you were probably, you and a few other people, were were ultimately the people who really had were on the side of, you know, having not necessarily predicted exactly how it would happen, but that this was going to happen, and this was a real concern. What happened to you? As far as your work, and with Morton Thiokol, and your job, and you were in charge of the Solid Rockert Booster program for Morton Thiokol.

Allan McDonald [00:28:08]:

Yes. I was. And I, quickly diagnosed exactly what happened. We sent it to Marshall and went home. I was totally exhausted because I was working almost 20 hours a day for several days trying to find another reason why it failed because I didn’t want it to be my solid rocket booster. I was hoping I’d find a reason that it was a secondary failure or something. Something else caused that, and I couldn’t. It was another nail in the coffin.

Allan McDonald [00:28:34]:

When I came home, that Sunday from skiing with my children because I’d been working all week. My wife said I had to catch a a plane out of Ogden for for the company to go to an emergency meeting of the presidential commission. And what had happened was that the New York Times had published a memo from a budget analyst at NASA saying that, these folks from Morton Thiokol were here last summer asking for a whole bunch of money to fix this field joint o-ring thing they have. Could that have had anything to do with this accident? Well, immediately, the presidential commission got inundated by the press about that. They knew nothing about it. NASA had not told them even any idea they had of what caused the shuttle failure, much less that. And so they asked NASA to come in and explain to him whether this memo was credible. This guy had any, knowledge about the technical issues he said in this memo that we’re trying to be fixed.

Allan McDonald [00:29:32]:

And they immediately called me back because the memo was written about a meeting in the summer of 85 that I had actually presented to NASA, but I thought was the most critical area to fix, and that was the steel joint o-ring system.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:47]:

Exactly the system that caused the accident.

Allan McDonald [00:29:49]:

And it ended up getting turned down when we submit our proposal because it was very costly, you know, it’s considered, too costly at the time and not cost effective. And that was the memo this guy sent from the budget side. Well, the commission decided to have a meeting with NASA, and NASA won a meeting earlier that morning and asked me to bring all the graphs that I had brought to Washington that summer about that issue back with me and update him to what we know now. I did. Gave them to him. We went over to the old executive office building next to the White House where they had the meeting, and NASA started to present what they knew and took a break and finally, came back to resume their presentation. They hadn’t asked me to participate. In fact, they made it clear that they would take care of the whole thing.

Allan McDonald [00:30:40]:

And if they needed any specific help, they would specifically ask for it. When they went in the commission’s hearing to shut the door and I was out in the hallway with a couple engineers I invited, we sat up in the, gallery essentially. And Sally Wright finally asked him if it was really true. She returned her some of the phone calls that a reporter asked if it was really true that I’d heard a rumor that when a contractor was so concerned about the cold weather, they may have even asked NASA to cancel a launch. Is that true? And the response from NASA was that, yeah, there was a lot of people worried about the cold weather and all and batteries and other things. And even Morton Thiokol wanted to make sure that we understood that we’re flying outside of what our experienced space was.

Allan McDonald [00:31:24]:

We tied all our engineers in with our engineers, The management people review all that, and as a result in this, Morton Thiokol told us to proceed on with the launch as planned, and we have a signed document to that effect.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:36]:

And so there you are in the galleries upstairs listening all this. You’re the guy at the conch who refused to sign the document for launch. What did you do?

Allan McDonald [00:31:48]:

Well, I couldn’t restrain myself. I thought, you know, that’s that’s true, but it’s very deceiving. And so I walked down from the gallery and waving my hand and finally got acknowledged by back mister Molloy was presenting some of my graphs saying I I had something to add. He was being asked questions. I said forget about what’s on the wall. I’d like to step back here a couple minutes ago when doctor Wright had asked a question about whether one of the contractors was concerned enough about temperatures they may have recommended not to launch. I said, I think this commission should know that Martin Pacheco was so concerned about those temperatures that we recommended not to launch below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and we put that in writing. Now I’ll never forget chairman William Rogers of the commission and and Neil Armstrong, Vice chairman standing up and kinda looking at me, wondering who this guy was coming down, and chairman Rogers said, Would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard? Because if I heard what I think I heard, this will be in litigation for years to come.

Allan McDonald [00:32:58]:

And I repeated what he had heard, and my life changed when he said that because I knew who is gonna be in all this litigation for years to come. So I made a conscious decision at that instance that I was gonna soon as I got out of this meeting, start writing down as much detail as I could about everything that I had been involved in since I came into the shuttle program 2 years earlier up through the days before this launch, the day of the launch, and whatever transpired from the commission’s hearings. Well, when I got back home to the plant that following Monday, the first thing I found on my desk was a note, theGeneral manager wants me in his office ASAP. I went in there. And he said, Al, you no longer had a shuttle program. All the people work for you working for the fellow fellow, even your secretary. You will keep your office because you’re gonna be head of scheduling. I said head of a scheduling? What the hell is a schedule? I’m gonna build anything.

Allan McDonald [00:33:58]:

And he said, well, that’s for you to figure out. It was obviously a non job, hoping that I would quit. And I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the, chief scientist company coming in and after I heard about that and said, Al, you know, he says this whole company is gonna be inundated with responses to this commission and investigation. He said, so I just pointed myself as a committee of 1 to figure out how we’re gonna fix this problem so it can never happen again. And I’d like to make that a committee of 2. Would you join me? I said absolutely. I think I know how to fix it.

Allan McDonald [00:34:33]:

And, I did that for a few months. And ironically, a few months later, I was back in Washington DC for another reason. I was the chairman of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Solid Rocket Technical Committee. I was handing my gavel over to the new chairman, And I went to a symposium they had there because what happened in April of 1986, a few months after Challenger, the Titan 34 d blew up about 800 feet off the ground at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and it was the only other vehicle that was capable of launching these huge spy satellites when we were still in this cold war with the Soviet Union. So we had a big crisis, and they were gonna have this fellow talk about it. And I sat in the front row, and the speaker was general Don Catena, who was the Commander of the LA Air Force Station there, Air Force systems command. He gave his speech and he saw me sit in the front row and he walked down because he was a member of the presidential mission.

Allan McDonald [00:35:33]:

He said, Al, what are you doing here listening this rhetoric that we’re putting out to the press of how we’re gonna crawl off from this big mess we made for ourselves. You ought to be spending all of your time figuring out why the shuttle failed the way it did. That’s why I’m not doing that. What do you mean you’re not doing that? I says, no. I got removed from the failure team. You got removed? Yes. When did that happen? I said, I think it was exactly one day after I testified before you people. Said you’re kidding me.

Allan McDonald [00:36:03]:

We’ll fix that problem. He mainly called chairman Rogers who brought all my senior executives back for a meeting a couple days later and wire brushed them. Following Monday, I went in and had a meeting with our new general manager, and he offered to give me this new position they were creating between NASA and Morton Thiokol to make this super task force to return the shuttle a safe flight as soon as possible to bypass a lot of the red tape. So it’s more like you said a skunk works or lock key and that we would have the senior position in that task force. And they were offering that to me and asking you if I’d take it. I said yes. And, I was working long days, long hours. A couple months later, I got a phone call from congressman Markey from Massachusetts, now a senator.

Allan McDonald [00:36:54]:

He says, mister McDonald, it’s really true that you’re a super task force when your agent between NASA and your company, to restore the shuttle a safe flight, or is that just some rhetoric your company splitting out to the press to make it appear as if you got a responsible job and they just got you doing some scheduling because that had leaked to the press. And I says, no. I, I really am doing that. I’m working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Do you know something I don’t know? So I’m sure you’re aware of house joint resolution 634, aren’t you? I said never heard of it. Yeah. Well, that was a resolution I introduced to congress that was passed, not only by the entire congress, but also by the entire senate on your behalf to reinstate you to your job. Would you like to have a copy of that? I said, I sure would.

Allan McDonald [00:37:40]:

And, he sent me a copy. I’ll send you a copy also of a letter sent to your CEO in Chicago, I’ll talk to my colleagues in the senate, namely Eagleton and Gore, who sent a similar letter on your behalf to the MASA administrator. And it basically said that if they didn’t reinstate me the job equivalent to the one I had before I testified before the presidential commission, they would not only cancel their existing shuttle contract with the company, but they would ban the company from ever having any kind of a NASA contract in the future.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:12]:

So if I’m reading my, history right and the documentation I know of on this, you have the distinction, Sir, being the only person in the history of the United States where congress passed a law directed at 1 individual, and that was you to reinstate your job.

Allan McDonald [00:38:29]:

That is correct. And I did not know that until I was speaking at Cornell a few years ago, and professor had researched that because he couldn’t hardly believe it. And he finally went down to the Library of Congress when he was in Washington and put in a search for that, and they came back and said, yes. This fellow did get reinstated. He is the only one ever in American history that got reinstated to his job by an act of congress.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:52]:

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So this actually leads me to a question that that is one I’ve wondered about after meeting you is this accident happened in 1986. You didn’t leave your job at Morton Thiokol until it was a 2008, 2009?

Allan McDonald [00:39:11]:

It was at 2001.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:13]:

2001. So it was another 15 years after all of this happened, after they had try to remove you from the position of responsibility after they basically, I mean, everything imaginable that a company could try to do, they did to you, and yet you you chose to stay there for another 15 years.

Allan McDonald [00:39:35]:

Well, the first reason I chose to stay is once I accepted that job to fix problem. It totally consumed me, but it also put a very good memory bank next to the bad one of Challenger fixing that problem so indeed it would never happen again. And I was ahead of that program for the next 3 years. I went ahead and was the, launch representative for the company for 1st 3 flights after Challenger in 1988 and 89 where we demonstrated that system was much safer than it ever was. In fact, I always quoted it as the safest part of the shuttle when I retired back in 2011 after 110 perfect flights after that. So it was the best part of the shuttle. I felt very good about that. But I also did not want to stay in that hot seat for that length of time, so I told them I would stay on the first 3 flights, which were fully instrumented.

Allan McDonald [00:40:38]:

And then I wanted to find another position, and I did. I got involved in some advanced technology that I certainly enjoyed doing. And then several years later, there was a big scare about solid rockets causing ozone holes that I got involved in. And, at the end of my career, I was head of all the advanced technology, out of the plant, everything from airbags to our missiles, strategic tactical space motors.

Dave Stachowiak [00:41:09]:

And, well, that actually brings me to 1 question I’ve wondered about since you’re in your story- why does it matter that you did what you did even though it didn’t change the outcome?

Allan McDonald [00:41:22]:

Well, the the first thing of why it really matters is I’ve always told people that they shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions or speak up because I always feel that their professional opinion, is not only important, it’s their responsibility as as being a professional. And I also told people that, you know, you need to take personal ownership and pride in what you do so that when you walk away at night, you feel like you did the best you could have done. And I’ll tell you, that’ll make the rest of your life much more pleasant if you really feel that way. And I know that from my own experience, that was the right course to take because now that I have an opportunity to speak to University students are about to enter into their profession. I tell them that one of the lessons I truly learned was don’t always assume everything. Don’t always assume if it’s really critical. And and and by critical, it could really impact people’s lives that other people always do their job, And I’ve always reflected back on absolute shock when I heard the presidential commission’s testimony from some of the NASA managers and found out that the ones I argued with, the ones who heard all of this controversy, never mentioned a word to the fellow sitting right next to them and the mission management team, which was a 100% NASA at that time, saying there was even any concern about cold temperatures.

Dave Stachowiak [00:43:10]:

You know, Al, and I’m so grateful for your your leadership in not only that day, but in what you did since then of helping to make this the safest part of the shuttle, like you said, and also just your own, your willingness to examine, you know, where you were right, where you were wrong. You know, all of us contribute when something when when an accident like this happens. You know? Obviously, you dealt with an accident far greater scale than I hope any of us ever will deal with in our careers. And I’m also grateful for the fact that you’ve, even after retirement, have been writing, have been going around and speaking, and have continued to educate people. Your books are required reading in some engineering programs, and I feel really honored for the lessons of of leadership you’ve continued to bring to people. And I’m I’m really wondering for those who really wanna get into this more. Obviously, the book’s a great place for people to to go and check out more about the story. There’s so much detail we’re not even covering in the conversation today.

Dave Stachowiak [00:44:09]:

What else is a good way for folks to track you down or if they’d like to have you come speak at their organization?

Allan McDonald [00:44:14]:

Well, I do have a website atwww.ethicskeynotespeaker.com. All in one word. Ethicskeynotespeaker.com that has some backgroun relative to my book, and some of my background also relative to my prior history at the company that worked on all these other missile systems. So they can find out information there. I have my, email address at that side as well. They certainly welcome to send me an email. My phone number’s on there. They can call me, and I’d be happy to hear from them.

Allan McDonald [00:44:50]:

And I’d like to hear, their response to to my book if they have a chance to read it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:44:55]:

Well and I’ll certainly share any comments that, come in on the show notes, and I’d encourage our audience to share those as well. And and having been in the audience for now 2 of the presentations I’ve seen Al give over the last couple years. I have never seen a group of people sit more still and more captivated by every word of the story you’ve told Al than they did during watching you speak, about this accident. So thank you so much for your your leadership, your courage now and also then. And, I’m really grateful for you sharing your story with us today.

Allan McDonald [00:45:30]:

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to share my story with your audience. Thanks a lot, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:45:36]:

Al Macdonald is the former program manager for the Solid Rocket Boosters during the Challenger accident and is the author of the book Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster with James R. Hansen. Al, thank you so much.

Allan McDonald [00:45:51]:

Thank you, Dave.