By Julia Boyle
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

More than two decades ago this month, Allan McDonald, 70, urged NASA officials to call off the Challenger’s launch. He directed the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for Morton Thiokol, Inc., the company that made the shuttle’s booster rockets.

He had listened intently to the Cape Canaveral weather forecast the night before the launch on January 28, 1986; he knew his rockets would fail.

Thiokol engineers expected the rockets’ seals (O-rings) to malfunction at low temperatures, and Cape weathermen forecasted temperatures below 20°F.

Yet, behind closed doors, someone made the decision to proceed. And McDonald and millions of Americans watched the Challenger explode in the sky the next morning.

Truth, Lies and O-Rings
This spring, McDonald plans to release his memoir on the incident and the decision to launch. Titled Truth, Lies and O-Rings: The Untold Story Behind the Challenger Accident, the book is co-authored by James R. Hansen.

Since the first Presidential Commission hearing regarding the Challenger explosion, McDonald recorded every detail from the investigation, the press coverage, and the shuttle’s redesign. “I knew who would be in the middle of all the litigation—me,” he says. “So I immediately decided I needed to write down everything that happened to me.”

McDonald says he wanted his book to be a real history about what really happened. “There have been a lot of books published about Challenger, but not one was written by a single person involved in it,” he says.

“I kept all those records, and when I retired in 2001, I had 1,400 handwritten  pages from the time [the Challenger explosion] happened to the return to flight,” he says. “I took that material and used it in writing the book.”

Lesson to be learned
As McDonald dug deeper in his research, he discovered a broader lesson—one that he hopes his readers will learn from his book (which he had originally intended to be used in engineering ethics classes).