Image Of Explosion, Anger Stay With Former Scientist
Like millions of Americans, Gonzaga law student Rick Glover was glued to a TV when the space shuttle Challenger exploded.
Except Glover was watching from Mission Control in Houston, where he worked as a rocket scientist.
“It was kind of a bad day at the office,” the avowed cynic says. “When you saw the big poof of white smoke, you didn’t want to believe it. Ten seconds later, we realized the orbiter wasn’t going to fly out of it. We were shocked.”
Glover, 34, graduated from the University of Michigan with an aerospace engineering degree and immediately went to work for McDonnell-Douglas Technical Services Co., a NASA contractor.
He spent 10 years working in flight design and with the main engines and solid rocket boosters. He also trained astronauts on the flight simulator.
On the Challenger’s last mission, labeled 51L, Glover’s job was to determine how much propellant was on board to maneuver the craft once it reached orbit.
In the aftermath of the disaster, Glover remembers learning that Morton-Thiokol engineers had warned NASA managers about launching in near-freezing temperatures. Glover remembers the anger, which hasn’t passed. The engineers had been racked with guilt wondering whether they had forgotten to tighten a bolt or accidentally pushed a wrong button.
Glover agrees with critics that politics pushed NASA to launch that day. President Reagan was to give his State of the Union speech that night and would showcase the Teacher in Space program.
“It was cold-blooded murder,” Glover says. “Space flight is never going to be risk free, but you can’t disregard smart and credible engineers. The astronauts are the right stuff. The engineers are the real stuff. It’s the engineers that make this thing go.”
Glover was in a small room at Johnson Space Center watching a monitor with several colleagues. After a stunned silence, a secretary ran screaming from the room. Glover and the others quickly left the building, which by procedure had to be locked down to aid in the post-explosion investigation.
He remembers two managers wondering out loud how the deaths of six astronauts and a school teacher would affect the space program and their jobs. Glover thought it was insensitive.
“This is like the JFK assassination. I can’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I recall every detail of that day.”
In 1993, after his frustrations with working in a large bureaucracy had boiled over, Glover left Houston for law school in Spokane. He wanted to be near the mountains.
He will graduate in May and return to his wife in Texas, hoping to catch on with a firm and maybe specialize in technology copyright law.
Glover says the United States should continue exploring space but should consider unmanned missions when they’re viable. It didn’t take seven people, he says, to launch a satellite - the Challenger’s real mission beyond the hype of sending a civilian into space.
“In the ‘60s, everyone was amazed when these things worked. In the ‘80s, we were amazed when they didn’t. This was an avoidable accident. NASA just didn’t heed the warning signs.”
, DataTimes