They Killed Them For a Stupid Speech: The Challenger Disaster and its Relationship to Failures of Leadership

I was just listening to a discussion on Coast-to-Coast AM about failures of leadership, and something was revealed about a seminal event that I lived through, and was deeply effected by, and yet knew nothing about.

I like many others, watched the Challenger Shuttle Disaster happen LIVE on the air. I was in High School at the time, living on a military base stationed overseas with my family. Because of the time difference, that meant that I watched the launch when I got home from school that afternoon.

Now in addition to being a real fan of the Space Program (I even met Apollo Astronaut Jim Irwin when I was a kid - he drove the land rover on the moon), my photography teacher was one of the finalists in the program to send an educator up on the Shuttle into space. In fact, she was there that fateful day, at Cape Canaveral, standing right next to Christa McAuliffe's parents, and she was literally the first one to tell them that what they were seeing was not how it was supposed to look -- that something had gone horribly wrong.

So I was very well aware of how the systems on the Shuttle worked, in fact, enough so to actually comment that same day, "What's that flame there - there by the EV? It's too high," long before the official explanation was given. As a young person full of hope for the future, I was absolutely heartbroken when the spacecraft exploded, and those heroes perished.

Well it seems that Marc Gerstein & Michael Ellsberg (son of the man who released the Pentagon Papers) have written a new book called "Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental" on leadership, whistleblowers, the concealment of risk, and why organizations fail to tell the truth even to themselves. Apparently, among the many case studies they confront in the book, they discuss the Challenger Disaster.

They've found out that the reason why they launched the Shuttle on THAT PARTICULAR DAY, was because Ronald Reagan wanted to talk with the astronauts live, during his State of the Union speech.

Now that particular day happened to be the coldest that they had ever launched on. Normally, because of all the problems that accompany icing anyways, they would have postponed the launch until things warmed up a bit. And the engineers had previously expressed concerns about why the O-rings were behaving as they were in other launches. But if they hadn't launched THAT DAY, the Republicans wouldn't have been able to USE those HUMANS onboard for their precious photo-op.

So NASA, who's budget had already been cut by those same Republicans to just 1/3rd of what it was during the Apollo days, had to deal with that reality, along with all the normal pressures, plus the additional ones surrounding having the first civilian aboard, and now there there were pressures from the White House to launch - in spite of the cold - for fear that if they didn't, even MORE of their budget would be cut.

To put it in the simplest terms, THE REPUBLICANS KILLED THOSE PEOPLE FOR A STUPID SPEECH.

And Administrators at NASA, our of fear (justified though it may have been) let them.

Now I was upset about that incident already. My own teacher came a breath away from actually being ON that flight, but the idea that they pulled that crap, and then stood around acting like they had no role in the accident, that they were sympathetic and caring, that they hugged the families who's sons and daughters THEY'D JUST HELPED KILL, just angers me in a way I can't even fathom.

I was angry during the Reagan years for a lot of reasons. For my generation, it was the first exposure we'd gotten to Republican corruption (I was too young to have experienced Nixon), and everything from Iran-Contra, to the unwillingness to divest from South Africa during Apartheid, to the useless Star Wars program, to the dumping of a million mentally ill people onto the streets.... I mean it goes on, and on, and on.... all that offended my sense of justice enough. But things have been - mindbogglingly - so much WORSE under the latest Republican Administration, that'd I'd forgotten (to a certain degree) how much the Reagan era pissed me off.

It just seemed to pale in comparison (and in many ways it does, because the lying and corruption is so blatant now).

Well I just got a reminder that those people were similarly callous and careless with human life (unless of course, that "life" was a fetus).

And I don't want that FACT forgotten.

There's a lot of weird, mindless hero-worship about the Reagan Era, thanks to aggressive revisionist history advanced by the Republicans and their whorish sychophants in the corporate media, but I don't want AVERAGE people to be fooled by that nonsense.

The terrible things you see today, are actually NOT aberrations. They are SYSTEMIC problems.

They are the NATURAL result of the power systems we have set up, and the short-term thinking we engage in, that INTENTIONALLY silences truth.

Much has been made about the Chimp-in-Chief's latest example of this, in his "look at the sock stuffed in my codpiece I'm such a big man" speech on an aircraft carrier. That was less immediate and direct than the Reagan State of the Union/Challenger incident, but for all intensive purposes, it was the same thing.

People had to die in a war to make some jerk in the Oval Office look good.

So I want to encourage everyone to read Gerstein & Ellsberg's book. It confronts many incidents (the Bophal chemical disaster, Sibel Edmonds, Enron, the Stanford Experiment & Abu Ghraib, Chernobyl, Katrina, and a bunch of others) and how these large-scale disasters happen, why truth-tellers are not only ignored, but actively punished for that truth-telling, how those we've called our leaders are willing to engage in great risks with OTHER people's lives, and to silence those who reveal those risks. Such actions ultimately weaken us all, and can only be combated, if we face the reality of them.

We have a problem with leadership that while it has often manifested in this country among Republicans to the most extreme degree, it extends far beyond them. Our business life is deeply affected by the lack of good leadership skills, of ETHICAL BEHAVIOR (not moral behavior, I'm talking about standards of conduct independent of any particular religious dogma), standards of honor and compassion, and SIMPLE HONESTY, and respect for others who ARE honest. The press itself doesn't not confront this issue, because they too have been corrupted by the same lack of an ethical center, and an unwillingness to care for the interests of the little guy.

Though mileage may vary regarding whether you liked the actual movie or not, there was an important line in "The Da Vinci Code" that applies here. The character of the French woman thought to be the descendant of Jesus Christ says in passing, "We are who we protect."

One reason why ethical behavior is so lacking, is that we fail to ask the right questions of ourselves.

Who am I protecting with this action (or lack thereof)? The powerful? The wealthy? The status quo? The bottom line at the expense of ordinary people? My own skin?

Or am I protecting those who cannot defend themselves? Those who might be unaware of a problem, yet endangered by it? Those who are young or elderly? Those who are poor?

WHO DO YOU PROTECT?

WHAT DO YOU PROTECT?

The Rule of Law? The rights of everyone to equal treatment? Fairness itself? The environment that sustains all life? Logic? Honor? People, or property?

And while beginning to ask these questions is critical, of more importance is knowing how to ANSWER THEM in a way that helps both individuals, and the society at large.