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teen on the booster. None was given any priority, so none stood out as requiring urgent attention. Launch constraints were bureaucratically imposed and routinely waived by Lawrence Mulloy, booster program manager at Marshall. An assessment paper at Marshall on January Twenty-Third, Nineteen Eighty-Six declared "This problem is considered closed."

The night before the launch, George Hardy, a senior Marshall manager, challenged Thiokol's own engineers concerned with the effect of the unusually cold temperatures on the seals stating that he was "appalled" - before the Rogers Commission this became "somewhat appalled" - at the concern. In the now infamous teleconference, four Thiokol vice-presidents at first supported their engineers and then took a "management" vote in which the engineers had no voice.

Don Eyles, an independent engineer under contract to NASA in the Nineteen Sixties states that although organizational lines and charts masked the true lines of authority, engineers commanded loyalty in proportion to their technical skill. No official barriers restricted debate. It was inconceivable that a bureaucrat could overrule on a technical matter. That space flight was dangerous was obvious but the principle - never overlook a clue and always ask - what if (?) - was "almost religious". He remembers Apollo meetings with forty engineers in which everyone was welcome to speak and in which decisions were openly made. Were the astronauts tracking (or permitted to?) the booster problems? During Apollo he observed a spirit among astronauts to do whatever was necessary to be informed on issues relating to their survival.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze in details the political-economic pressures that set a frame on the conduct of the NASA enterprise but certain facts can be highlighted. NASA during the Eighties has been operating on a reduced budget compared to the glory days of the late Nineteen Sixties. There has been confusion and diffusion of goals with overemphasis on the shuttle as the key vehicle and symbol. The net effect of this has been to make the

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