On the fifteenth anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, I have decided to try to make available some material not seen before, and to try to explain how I came to feel about NASA.  I will have to add to this site later, but I did want to put some material out today.

- Eric Dahlstrom
Jan. 28, 2001
 
 

Lessons Learned From Challenger Study

After the accident, I worked at PRC under a NASA contract to prepare this report.  We followed the guidelines for a NASA lessons learned report (describing the ‘problem, causes, and lessons learned’).  We did not do any new investigations, this was a report to analyze and combine all the other studies (internal NASA, Rogers Commission, Congressional reports, etc.). This report was originally prepared to develop lessons for the Space Station program (which had started in 1984), so it includes specific applications to the Space Station program.  The next draft had these parts removed.

What surprised me was the reaction to this draft at a meeting of the heads of the NASA safety offices.  The safety offices had been made independent after the Challenger accident.  They were charged with keeping NASA from repeating the mistakes that lead to the accident.  But when they saw this report, some of them became very upset.  The NASA Johnson (Houston, Texas) safety representative said he was ‘sick of seeing bad things written about NASA’, threw our report in the trash, and left the meeting.  These bad things in this report are simply restatements from the other investigations, and describe conditions before the accident.  This man was supposed to make sure these things didn’t happen in the future, but he didn’t want to hear anything had ever been wrong.

The result was that someone else edited our report, and removed all ‘bad things’ said about NASA (some of us refused to cooperate).  The scrubbed report (March 1998) was printed - but only 25 copies were made, there was no tracking number, and they were all filed away.  In other words, the report was suppressed.

So here, for the very first time, is the report “Lessons Learned From Challenger.”

(Note – this “version 0” does not include the few graphics.  I had to convert the text files last night from old Mac software (WriteNow to text to MS Word to pdf), and I tried to make this somewhat readable.  I will provide a better version in a few days.)
 

Lessons Learned From Challenger, NASA Headquarters (February 1988 draft)
LessonsLearnedFromChallenger-1988-v0.pdf
(I will add the few figures to this report later, and update this link.)

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