James R. Hansen was an aerospace historian at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton the day the Challenger exploded.
“Like a lot of people that were around at the time,” Hansen said, “it was one of those events like Kennedy or the Dr. King assassinations where you remember where you were.”
Hansen was busy in the archives in Building 1195 when somebody poked his head through the door with the news: “The Challenger just exploded.”
He and his colleagues quickly congregated around a television in the media room, watching the replay over and over.
“It seemed like a horrible, horrible day for everybody,” Hansen recalled in a phone interview from Alabama, where he’s now a history professor at Auburn University.
In 2009, Hansen helped craft a book on the Challenger disaster called “Truth, Lies and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.” The chief author is Allan McDonald, then an engineer at Morton-Thiokol Inc. and critic of the decision by Thiokol to recommend a launch, overriding the recommendation of its own engineers who were concerned that freezing temperatures had compromised the O-rings.
“That was the whole key, really, to why the launch went ahead,” Hansen said. “And why it should not have.
“The answer is, basically, corporate greed.”
Thiokol was then angling for a sole-source contract with NASA to provide the solid-rocket boosters for the space shuttles, he said, so company managers were eager to make NASA happy.
“There’s no question there was some pressure from NASA,” Hansen said. “There’s enough blame to go around. I don’t think they were thinking they were going to cause the death of the crew and loss of the vehicle,” he added. “They were thinking it hasn’t happened before, it won’t happen this time, either.”
As NASA turns increasingly to commercial space companies to ferry cargo to the International Space Station more cheaply, he said, a lesson going forward is to resist putting profit before safety.
“We’re bound to have them (accidents) in future — it’s just too difficult to do perfectly,” Hansen said. “You just have to make sure safeguards are in place to minimize risk as much as possible.”
The 30th anniversary of the Jan. 28, 1986, disaster is for him both personal and professional.
“It’s remembering the astronauts and the spirit that they brought to this,” Hansen said. “They hold no blame in this. There was nothing they did wrong.
“I think it always goes down to the lost souls. I think it’s remembering those seven people who put everything on the line for something they believed in.”
