© Steve Helber/AP In this Jan. 28, 198, file photo the space shuttle Challenger is destroyed by an explosion shortly after it lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Why me?”
This is what Bob Ebeling planned to demand of God, when he saw him: “Why me? You picked a loser.”
For three decades Ebeling, a former rocket engineer for NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, had been swamped by his own grief and guilt over the catastrophe he’d failed to stop. In the days before the space shuttle Challenger burned up in mid-air, killing all seven astronauts on board, Ebeling and four other engineers had pleaded with NASA to delay the launch. They had concerns about whether the rubber o-rings on the shuttle’s booster rockets would seal properly in the frigid winter weather. Ebeling even authored an alarmed memo detailing the problems with the rings. Its subject line read, bluntly, “Help!”
But the engineers were overruled. On January 28, 1986, he and his colleagues watched in helpless horror as the shuttle and its crew turned to ashes in the sky.
“I think that was one of the mistakes that God made,” Ebeling told NPR this year. “He shouldn’t have picked me for that job. I don’t know.”
But hundreds of people who listened to that interview, which aired on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger explosion in January, disagreed. They included Allan McDonald, Ebeling’s boss and Thiokol’s representative at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the day of the launch.
“I called [Ebeling] up and told him, ‘You know, to me, my definition of a loser is somebody that really doesn’t do anything, but worse yet, they don’t care,'” McDonald told NPR a month later. “I said, ‘You did something, and you really cared. That’s the definition of a winner.'”
Ebeling died Monday in Brigham City, Utah, at age 89, his family said. But, thanks in part to the assurances from McDonald and untold others, he goes to God less burdened by the question that has haunted him for the past thirty years.
“It was as if he got permission from the world,” his daughter Leslie Ebeling Serna told NPR. “He was able to let that part of his life go.”
Ebeling is survived by his wife Darlene and 35 descendants spanning four generations.
The Illinois native had lived in Brigham City for more than half a century. He was a quiet, prayerful man — a husband, a devoted father, a great lover of the outdoors. He spent his free time birding, biking and boating in the vast wetland not too far from the Thiokol plant where he worked, he told the Salt Lake Tribune.
But he knew sorrow, too. In the years before the Challenger explosion, his son had committed suicide, Ebeling told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. At the time, Ebeling had cradled the young man in his arms and wondered why he hadn’t done more to prevent his death.
It was a question he’d soon be asking himself again.
In 1985, booster rockets recovered from the Jan. 24 launch of the shuttle Discovery showed signs of seal problems. Ebeling, who had been working in engineering for 40 years, and two other engineers were assigned to examine the issue. Their findings were worrying — the rubber o-ring seals stiffened in cold weather, allowing the hot, high pressure gas inside the boosters to leak out — but NASA and their managers at Thiokol were slow to react.
That October, Ebeling wrote an urgent memo to McDonald, his boss, under the now-infamous subject line “Help!” He told McDonald that the rocket seal task force needed more resources, according to a presidential commission’s 1986 report on the accident, and signed off with the words “This is a red flag.”
But the launch date — already delayed once because of wind conditions — was approaching, with forecasted temperatures of about 30 degrees. The afternoon before the Challenger was due to take off, Ebeling called McDonald warning him that the cold could be disastrous for the launch. That set off six hours of teleconferences between Thiokol engineers and executives and officials with NASA. Ebeling wasn’t on that phone call, according to the Times — but McDonald, along with engineers Arnold Thompson and Roger Boisjoly, argued emphatically for a delay.
The space agency was determined to launch, though it’s never been quite clear why. President Ronald Reagan was due to discuss the space program in his State of the Union address that night. NASA also prided itself on sending up shuttles routinely and reliably, and it had already pushed back the Challenger launch once.
Either way, officials fiercely resisted the suggestion of another delay. George Hardy, deputy director for science and engineering at the Marshall Space Flight Center, allegedly told the engineers he was “appalled” by their recommendation.
“My God, Thiokol,” shuttle program manager Lawrence Mulloy was said to have asked, “When do you want me to launch, next April?”
Late that night, the executives and officials cast their final votes: Go.
Ebeling drove home uncharacteristically furious. “It’s going to blow up,” he told his wife, grimly.
The next day, Ebeling invited Boisjoly, his fellow engineer, into his office to watch the shuttle take off. When the clock reached T minus 5 seconds, Boisjoly would later tell the Guardian, the two men reached out to hold each other’s hands.
Three. Two. One.
At “lift off,” the shuttle rocketed into the sky, clearing the launch pad without issue.
“I turned to Bob and said, ‘We’ve dodged a bullet,” Boisjoly recalled.
Ebeling, meanwhile, was in the midst of a prayer: “Thank you for making me wrong,” he whispered. And then: “Kaboom. It went,” Ebeling told CBS. “I — I walked right out of there and went in my office and cried.”
All seven astronauts on board died: Commander Francis Scobee, Pilot Michael Smith, Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist Ronald McNair, Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis and “teacher in space” Christa McAuliffe.
Source by: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/finally-free-from-guilt-over-challenger-disaster-an-engineer-dies-in-peace/ar-BBqLzDT
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