A Consideration of the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident as Apologia

On January 28, 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger, mission 51-L, l aunched from Florida?s Kennedy Air force Base at 11:38 a.m. Eastern Stand ard Time. As the country watched in disbelief, the shuttle disintegrated 73 seconds later in an explosion of hydrogen and oxygen (7)*. All seven crew members died. On February 3, President Reagan issued an executive order to set up a commission to investigate the challenger accident. The c ommission was sworn in on February 6, and presented its report to the president on June 6 of the same year (1).

This report, commonly known as the Rogers Report, after its chairman William R. Roger, had a dual mandate from the president. First to look at the probable causes of the accident, and second, to develop recommendations for corrective action (1). This was done through a comprehensive investigation involving all of the following: interviews with more than 160 people, more than 35 formal panel investigations, examination of more than 6,300 documents (which included hundreds of photographs and more then 122,000 pages), the generation of almost 12,000 pages of transcript and another 2,800 pages of hearing transcripts (208).

*Unless otherwise noted, all citations are from the Commission Report.

This report is comprehensive, giving an account of all relevant, and much extraneous, material related to the Challenger accident. But it seems to be more than just a report to explain the Challenger accident and give suggestions to avoid a similar tragedy occurring in the future. In a sense, it appears to be a type of apologia; and this is the theory I will use to analyze this report. It is my contention that, in order to restore the image of NASA and the Space Shuttle Program, this report make use of Benoit?s strategies of apologia, particularly bolstering, defeasibility, and corrective action (Benoit 73-74). In order to consider this theory, I will first give brief descriptions of these strategies and the assumptions behind them. I will then conduct a chapter by chapter analysis, considering the main points of the chapter and specific ways that these apologia strategies are used within each chapter.

Benoit bases his theory of apologia on two assumptions. First, communication is primarily goal-driven, and second, a central goal of communication is to maintain a positive image or reputation (Benoit 63). After the Challenger explosion it became necessary for the government to restore the nation?s faith in the Space Program as the accident "evoked a wide range of deeply felt public responses" (1). Seven people had died when the Challenger exploded; one of them was a schoolteacher, whose students were watching the launch live on television. People were shocked, and they wanted explanations. NASA?s sterling image had been tarnished, and it needed to be restored if the space program was going to have an active future. There were certain strategies that proved useful in this restoration.

Three of Benoit?s apologia strategies are especially noticeable in the Rogers Report: bolstering, defeasibility, and corrective action. Bolstering is an attempt to improve the reputation of the accused (Benoit 73). Often this is done by showing positive attributes and actions of the accused (Benoit 76). This strategy is used throughout this report and can even be seen in the letter to the president at the beginning, where Rogers says "The nations task now is to move ahead to return to safe space flight and its recognized position of leadership in space." (emphasis mine).

Another strategy utilized in this report is defeasibility, in which the accused claims that "the action was due to lack of information or ability, and hence not entirely one?s own fault" (Benoit 73). Defeasibility is used in this report in order to mitigate responsibility and blame. At no time is a specific person held accountable for the accident or the decisions leading up to it. Although at times a larger entity is held up as having made faulty choices that contributed to this disaster, there are usually qualifications (such as lack of information) included to lessen the responsibility.

The most pervasive strategy, though, is that of corrective action. This is seen in the mandate of the commission, throughout the report, and in the concluding recommendations. The beginning of the recommendations section at the end of this report makes this corrective action aim clear: "?the commission has unanimously adopted recommendations to help assure the return to safe flight" (198). And the preface talks about using the lessons learned from the investigation to, again, "return to safe flight" (1). The assumption is made early that, prior to Challenger, the space program had been safe, and that with the right corrective measures it could be again.

The first chapter is an introduction. It begins with the genesis of the space shuttle program in the 1960?s and briefly covers all shuttle missions up to 51-L, the Challenger accident. One interesting aspect of this chapter was that in the brief summary of the shuttle missions there is no mention of the people on board-they just mention the experiments and payloads (4-6). There were 24 successful flights prior to the accident, and in these flights "the Shuttle demonstrated its ability to deliver a wide variety of payloads" (6). This explication of successful S huttle flights comes shortly after the report stating that " In 1982 , NASA declared the Space Shuttle ?operational?, a term that has come und er some criticism because it erroneously suggests that the Shuttle had at tained an airline-like degree of routine operation" (5). So although NASA made this declaration erroneously, they had good evidence for the s uccess of the shuttle. It was an "honest" mistake.

Chapter Two covers the events leading up to Challenger mission 51- L.It reports that preparations were fairly typical, although complicated by schedule changes (10). Short biographies of the crew members on this f atal mission are given (10-12). This is the only time in the report, acce pt for the memoriam at the very beginning, where the crew members are ref erred to by name. Actually, throughout most of this report, the human asp ect of this tragedy is downplayed. When the crew is mentioned, it is usua lly done in a way to try and mitigate the horror of what happened.

An example of this is seen at the end of this chapter, when I t s peaks briefly about the flight of the Challenger, "There were no al arms sounded in the cockpit. The crew apparently had no indication of a p roblem before the rapid break-up of the Space Shuttle System" (18). This quote might not seem all that important, but what it does is suggest that the crew did not suffer at all-that they died quickly. The final ch apter contains a very similar quote, "There are no indications that the crew had any warning of a problem before the fire and the disintegrat ion of the Space Shuttle" (186). What is interesting about these quo tes is that they lead the reader to believe that the deaths of the people on the Shuttle were quick, that they were not aware of what had happened 2E But the fact is no one is sure about this (it is never dealt with dir ectly in the report) and is really not provable one way or another. But t he "indications" show that it is Unlikely the crew realized wha t was happening.

"The Accident" is the title of the next chapter. It is the shortest chapter in the report. It deals with the accident in a very straightforward and unemotional manner. The flight started at 11:38 on Ja nuary 28, 1986, and ended 73 seconds later. "All seven crew members perished" (19). This is the only time the crew is mentioned in this chapter, but there is a reference to the Shuttle struggling "futilel y against the forces that were destroying it" (21). It?s interesting that the only thing given any agency here is the Shuttle, a machine. And that is one thing that is evident throughout this report. The mechanical is foregrounded; it is what is covered extensively. It makes it much eas ier to look at the Challenger explosion as an accident rather than a trag edy if one focuses on the machine and not the people on board the Shuttle 2E Then you can say things like "a series of events occurred extrem ely rapidly that terminated the flight" (20-21). Neat and clean and scientific.

Chapter Four deals with the cause of the accident. It is a fascin ating chapter, and one of the longest in the report. In sections this cha pter takes a piece by piece look at all major parts of the Shuttle and at the end of each section it has an italicized paragraph stating that this part did not cause or contribute to the accident. It?s not until the end of the chapter, after they?ve looked at all the parts of the Shut tle that worked correctly, that they get to the cause of the accident-the one part that did not work properly. When they do finally get to this se ction, they begin it with this quote, "As the investigation progress es, elements assessed as being improbable contributors to the accident we re eliminated from further consideration. This progress of elimination brought focus to the right Solid Rocket Motor" (53- emphasis mi ne). This suggests two things: First, the commission has done a comprehen sive investigation, and second, they did not have any idea at first that there had been concerns about the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) prior to fl ight. This lessens the seriousness of the pre-flight concerns with the SR Bs; although the next chapter of the report will show that there were con cerns about this aspect of the Shuttle. The conclusion of this chapter th en lists the failure of the "aft field joint of the right Solid Rock et Motor" as the cause of the Challenger accident, and says that it failed "due to a faulty design unacceptably sensitive to a number of factors" (72).

The next chapter then goes into more specifics on what some of th ese "factors" were. It is titled "The Contributing Cause o f The Accident", and it is the only chapter of the report in which s pecific names are given in relation to some of the problems that led to t his disaster. But this chapter starts out by using defeasibility to mitig ate the responsibility of those who made the decision to launch Challenge r Mission 51-L. The chapter opens with the following sentences: "The decision to launch the Challenger was flawed. Those who made the decisio n were unaware of the recent history of problems concerning the O-rings a nd the joint?.If the decisionmakers had known all the facts, it is highly unlikely they would have decided to launch 51-L on January 28, 1986" ; (82).

This chapter then looks at the chain of command and decisionmakin g that leads up to a Shuttle flight and includes excerpts from interviews with those people who were involved in these decisions. The gist of thes e interviews seems to be that the engineers at Thiokol, the manufacturer of the SRBs were opposed to the launch because of concern with the O-ring s, but that their recommendation was, in the end, overridden by managemen t?s decision to approve the launch. Roger Boisjoly, a Thiokol engineer a nd probably the most outspoken internal critic of the launch, had this to say during the interview, "There was never one comment in favor, as I have said, of launching by any engineer or other nonmanagement person in the room before or after the caucus" (93).

Although this would suggest that there was a particular group res ponsible for making this fateful, and fatal, decision, the report does no t support that. Rather the decision is seen as based on "serious fla ws in the decision making process", and miscommunication between the different levels and people in the flight readiness command chain (104). This interpretation allows for any blame to be shifted to an entity and away from any particular person, and also shows the problem as having bee n due to problems that can be recognized and solved. This chapter is int eresting from an apologia point of view because you also see the apologia strategies being used by the people being interviewed, as they attempt t o shift the blame and exonerate themselves. Unfortunately, that is too le ngthy an analysis to delve deeply into in this paper. What is important for this paper, though, is that the report allows them to do this. Not ev eryone is entirely excused of fault, but all blame is mitigated to an ext ent.

Chapter Six is titled "An Accident Rooted in History", and it contains one of the harshest suggestions of responsibility in the report. Speaking of the history of Solid Rocket Booster problems, the rep ort says, ?both NASA and contractor management first failed to recognize it as a problem, then failed to fix it and finally treated it as an accep table risk" (120). The report then goes on to take a comprehensive l ook at the design of the Solid Rocket Boosters and to catalog long-term p roblems and questions concerning the SRBs, especially the O-rings. Throug hout this chapter, the report is rather critical of NASA and Thiokol for their failure to acknowledge and deal with the well-documented O-ring and joint problems of the SRBs. But then at the end this failure to react is cited as a failure by NASA and Thiokol to "understand and re spond" to these problems that had been suggested by O-ring tests(148 -emphasis mine). Although it is somewhat mitigated by the suggestion that they just didn?t "understand", this chapter does assign some b lame to NASA and Thiokol for the way they handled questions of SRB design weaknesses.

The next chapter deals with the safety programs at NASA and the c ontractors that were supposed to make sure accidents like Challenger did not occur. It is aptly titled "The Silent Safety Program". The main point of this chapter is that "In its ?watchdog? role, an effec tively functioning safety, reliability and quality assurance organization could have taken action to prevent the 51-L accident" (155). It the n goes on to say that due to manpower shortages and a "decrease in t he considered importance of safety management" there were not effect ive safety organizations in control at NASA or Thiokol (160). But even in condemning them for downplaying safety factors, the report softens this by saying that it was due to "faulty reasoning"-that missions w ere seen as routine and not needing such precautions.

This chapter also talks about some mistakes in the reporting syst em that resulted in making "informed decisions" by management & quot;impossible" (156). This is a powerful use of the defeasibility defense. How can a person be accountable if they are misinformed or only partially informed? In speaking more specifically about his reporting pr oblem the report says, "While Mr. Moore was not being intentional ly deceived, he was obviously misled. The reporting system was not ma king trends, status and problems visible with sufficient accuracy and emphasis" (159- emphasis mine). This inaccuracy in reporting was serious as it concerned the designation of the SRB joints as Criticality 1R when they should have been listed as Criticality 1 (where Criticality 1 means that if the part fails there will be a loss of Shuttle and crew and that there is no back-up system, and Criticality 1R says that there i s a back-up in place). These joints were being listed on paperwork as red undant (as having a back-up system if the first joint failed to seal) lon g after it had been determined that they really weren?t (157-159).

The next chapter demonstrates an incredible job of bolstering. It talks about pressures on the system; basically that NASA was biting off more than it could chew. But it does this in a way that also shows many o f NASA?s attributes. For example, part of the problem is NASA?s "ca n-do" attitude, which has led to its great successes, but can also l ead it to take on challenges that it is not equipped to handle (171). In speaking of this the report concludes that "NASA?s optimism must be tempered by the realization that it cannot do everything" (172). One of the biggest pressures discussed in this chapter is the "optimist ic schedule" that NASA had for its Shuttle flights(165). NASA had a proposed flight rate that it could not handle, but that it was reluctant to relax. Also, management, at times, forgot "that the Shuttle was s till in the research and development stage" and allowed commitments to customers to obscure "engineering concerns" (165). In other words, payload was coming before people (safety), but this was due to NAS A?s optimism and can-do attitude-and it?s hard to fault them for that. As Benoit suggests, if the act was performed with "good intentions&quo t; (Benoit 73), it tends to lessen people?s negative responses. The secti on of the chapter then ends with a suggestion for how NASA can avoid this overextension in the future, "Mission scheduled should be based on realistic assessment of what NASA can do safely and well, not what is pos sible with maximum effort" (173).

The concluding chapter of this report finally returns to some dis cussion of the crew. It is titled "Other Safety Considerations" and it talks about what safety features Space Shuttles are equipped with and what possibilities there are for improving safety features on the Sh uttles. But before it gets into this discussion it makes one thing clear, that none of the safety considerations considered in this chapter could have helped the crew of Challenger Mission 51-L (179). This is reiterated later with a quote from Astronaut Robert Crippen: "I don?t know of any escape system that would have saved the crew from the particular inci dent that we just went through {the Challenger accident}" (184). Act ually, this chapter makes clear that, overall, there are very few options for crew escape once a Shuttle has launched (183). More specifically to the Challenger accident, the report states that the Shuttle was not desig ned for a crew to survive Solid Rocket Booster failure, and that therefor e it has been NASA?s philosophy that "the reliability of first stage ascent must be assured" (180). A philosophy that was evidently forg otten or ignored in this instance.

This chapter deals mostly with general escape options from a Shut tle, but as we?ve seen above, it also spends some time talking about how these issues relate to the Challenger accident. Although it doesn?t spend a lot of time doing this, it successfully makes one point clear-after th e Shuttle had been launched, there was no way for anyone to divert this d isaster or save the crew (186). One thing I thought was interesting is th at they again reiterated that there was "indication" that the c rew had any warning before the explosion and subsequent disintegration of the Shuttle (186). They then spend the rest of the chapter talking about other safety issues (landing problems, shuttle elements, etc.). This all serves to show a comprehensive review and concern for future Shuttle saf ety.

At the end of this report there are nine short sections of recomm endations, or as Benoit would say, corrective actions. They suggest that the problems have been identified and will be taken care of. That the &qu ot;accused" takes responsibility for the action and has implemented measures to make sure that it doesn?t reoccur Following directly after t hese recommendations is a concluding thought, which I will quote in it?s entirety as I think it essential to understanding the overall intent of t his report, and why it used certain apologia strategies.

The gist of this report was that the Challenger accident was an a berration. That the events and decisions that allowed this tragedy to occ ur had been identified and hence could be avoided in the future. Although certainly held accountable for making a faulty decision in this particul ar instance, NASA?s achievements and attributes are held up to try and ma intain and repair NASA?s image as the leader in space exploration and dev elopment. In order to do this it was necessary for the report to use cert ain strategies of apologia to try and bolster NASA?s image and convince t he country that it was an agency still deserving of our respect and suppo rt.

Overall, I think that the report was successful in its image rest oration (Benoit 75). There was no way for NASA, which is government agenc y, to deny the accident, which had been watched by millions of television viewers. So they did the next best thing. They accepted responsibility, but it was a responsibility with mitigating circumstances. No single pers on or agency was to blame; rather it was a case of miscommunication, misu nderstanding, and faulty decision making processes. In persuasively putti ng for the this interpretation, I think that this report succeeded in its communicative goals of explaining this disaster while at the same time r estoring the image of the agency, NASA, that was being held accountable f or this tragedy.

I would like to make one final point in conclusion. I don?t neces sarily think that the commissions use of these strategies was wrong or un ethical. The commission members seemed genuinely concerned to discover wh at caused the Challenger accident, and to find ways to make sure there wa s no similar accidents in the future. And they did at times take NASA and some of the contractors to task for making bad judgement calls and not p aying enough attention to safety issues. But I also think that they had a n interest in maintaining and bolstering the reputation of NASA and the U nited States Space Program, and this consideration appears to have been p art of their agenda in presenting their findings the way they have in thi s report.

Works Cited

Benoit, William L. Accounts, Excuses and Apologies: A Theory of Ima ge Restoration Strategies. New

York: State U of NY Press, 1995.

United States. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challe nger Accident.

Washington, D.C.: June 6, 1996.