Rogers’s rationale for running the commission in a very public way was persuasive even to Armstrong. “At the start Bill talked to all of the commissioners about what his expectations were and some of the things he thought were very important. He thought it was very important, for example, for the commissioners to be aware of how public opinion was being expressed through the media. So he encouraged everyone to read the Washington Post and the New York Times every morning, stuff that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of or encouraged. He understood that side of the equation.
“He was of a firm opinion—and I certainly agreed with this—that there ought to be one investigation, and that we had to find ways to placate the other constituencies out there that would like to be doing our job—or at least would like to be catching some of the limelight from it. So Bill was busy early on going over and talking with committee chairmen in the House and the Senate.
“So our compromise was that we, the commission, would report to Congress periodically. We would go over up to the Hill and testify to the progress of the investigation and what some of its difficult points were, some of the items we were making progress on, and what our outlooks were at that point. Then the legislators would get a certain amount of media coverage on what they were thinking and doing in Congress, but without it really affecting what was going on in the investigation.
“We had a lot more public hearings than I had ever been exposed to in any of the accident investigations that I had participated in before. So that was a new wrinkle for me. The fact that the investigation panel was a public entity had pluses and minuses. The pluses were that it did give us an opportunity to give a status report to the public at large as to what was happening, but it was also an opportunity for some people to play to the cameras.”
As vice chair of the commission, Armstrong sat ex officio on all subcommittees. “I probably spent the most time on the accident itself, because my feeling was that, if we didn’t get the accident pinned down precisely, then all the rest was for naught. So I wanted to be the closest to that.
“But each committee chair [Development and Production; Prelaunch Activities; Mission Planning and Operation; and Accident Analysis] established, with the help of their committee members, what kinds of matters they would be looking into, where they would go, and what kind of information they wanted to get. Then the commission staff headed by Dr. Alton G. Keel Jr., who came from the White House, and Thomas T. Reinhardt, an army major from the Office of Management of Budget, would put something together for each committee that would be sent out to Thiokol or North American or down to Huntsville. Each committee would set up their own schedule of hearings and presentations as well as site visits where they would look at hardware and get explained how things worked and see how things were put together. Each committee busied itself in the early months doing those kinds of things—getting a lot of data.
“From the Justice Department, we borrowed a system for keeping track of all the data and documents and filing them properly so that we could retrieve anything that we wanted at any time. So everything was both written down and computerized, which was good since the investigation generated almost 6,300 documents totaling more than 122,000 pages, as well as almost 12,000 pages of investigative and 2,800 pages of hearings transcript.
“We had several very good people on the staff, technically. There was a metallurgist from the National Transportation and Safety Board, Michael L. Marx, who was a great resource for us because metallurgical failures were involved in the burn-through of the Shuttle’s solid rocket booster.”
Armstrong did some of his own private investigating, seeking information or insights from some of the private contacts he had developed over thirty years in NASA and the aerospace industry. “On occasion I would talk to people privately. We had no such prohibitions from our chairman, so I didn’t hesitate to do that.”
Rogers specified, “We shouldn’t be offering opinions before the commission had ruled on these matters. We shouldn’t be giving individual opinions based on limited amounts of information. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and we shouldn’t be confusing the public by stating different positions. All contacts with the press were to be coordinated in advance, and there were a few times when commissioners were to talk to the press.
“Of course, we couldn’t always get the commissioners to remember what the rules were! And the media was always trying to get us to speak out. I remember Andrea Mitchell from NBC News saying, ‘Well, tell us this because it’s interesting.’ And I said, ‘Ms. Mitchell, this commission is not about “interesting.” This commission is about getting the answers.’ We had a pretty good system of protecting the commissioners and keeping them out of the public eye.”
Kutyna remembers another incident involving Vice Chair Armstrong and the press. “We had just flown in to Huntsville and the media was inside Marshall Space Flight Center headquarters, the von Braun building, waiting for us, anxious to get to Neil in particular. The reporters were chasing him down the hall and I said, ‘I know! Let’s get in the elevator! They will never get us there!’ So we jumped into the elevator and, of course, a media guy reached his arm in and pushed the stop button. There was Neil cornered in the back of this elevator with forty microphones, just sweating bullets.”
“I think we pretty much would have made the same conclusions without the public hearings. As for whether the investigation would have concluded any faster without them, because proof of our hypothesis [that “the cause of the Challenger accident was the failure of the pressure seal in the aft field joint of the right solid rocket motor…due to a faulty design unacceptably sensitive to a number of factors” including cold temperature] only came when we finally got that last piece of debris off the bottom of the ocean, the end result couldn’t really be hurried up.”
Transcripts of the public hearings into Challenger dated February 6 to May 2, 1986, illustrate the driving acumen behind Armstrong’s investigative thinking:
February 6, to Arnold Aldrich, Shuttle program manager at Johnson SpaceCenter, Houston, Texas:“Could I ask the source of the ice, what percentage was due to the ambient conditions and what was condensation on the vehicle that froze?”
February 14, to Robert K. Lund, Thiokol vice president for engineering:“Clearly, you had a concern about temperature. Did you ever consider or take thought of controlling the temperature at the seals, or to changing the material of the seals to something that had different characteristics?”
February 25, to Allan McDonald, director, Solid Rocket Motor Project andThiokol’s senior man at Kennedy Space Center:“Had Morton Thiokol to your knowledge ever informed NASA that the launch commit criteria were inadequate or did not in fact cover the kinds of conditions that you were concerned about?”
March 21, to George Abbey, director of Flight Crew Operations, JSC:“I think I understand that we have a system of very complex information flow and a system that you’ve devised with checks and balances to make sure that information flow properly gets to the right people. Nevertheless, we have to face the fact that somehow it hasn’t.”
The public hearings portion of the Rogers Commission investigation concluded with Armstrong’s leading another tough line of questioning for a NASA official (Lawrence M. Weeks, Jesse Moore’s deputy in NASA’s office for space flight), but not before Chairman Rogers’s confrontational summary: “Now, in answer to Mr. Armstrong’s questions, I got the impression you didn’t think there was anything wrong with the [NASA communications] system at all. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing, and I gather you don’t think the system of communication should be changed. Is that right?”
When it was all over, Armstrong came out pleased with the commission’s conclusions and recommendations. “I think the conclusions and findings were right on, and I think our descriptions of how the accident occurred were very close to precisely correct. There have been only a few contrary opinions or hypotheses, but none of them have stood the test of time.”
One of the most stubborn contrary opinions—primarily by engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama—is that instead of putting so much emphasis on frozen O-rings and on a flawed decision-making process to launch, the Rogers Commission should have taken a closer look at the effects of reusability on the external tank and solid rocket boosters—most specifically that, as a result of an assembly flaw at Cape Kennedy, the aft- and aft-center segments of Challenger’s guilty right-hand SRB were not mated together properly, were out of round, thereby creating the leaky joint and burn-through leading to the explosion.
As he did at the time, Armstrong supports the commission’s conclusions as the proper ones. “We spent so much time at the Cape. We were there to see how they put the SRBs and ET together. We looked at what all the possible errors could be as they were joining the sections, right there at the Cape. We didn’t discount the fact that there could be errors in assembly—and that the errors could be serious—but it was unanimous in the commission when we got to the end point, beyond a reasonable doubt of what had happened.”
Armstrong played the key role in laying out the basis for the manner of thinking that went into the commission’s final report. “I made the case to fellow commissioners that the effectiveness of our recommendations was going to be inversely proportional to their number. The fewer, the better. Second, let’s make sure that we don’t tell NASA to do something it can’t do. Those were the two fundamental ground rules.
“Then we had a long session where everybody wrote down everything that they thought might be related to a recommendation. Everybody wrote down everything they could think of, and we put them all together. There were a lot of duplications, but we got them down to about sixty or seventy.
“Then I said, ‘Okay, which of these are semiredundant or related? Is there any way we can combine these?’ That way we finally got down to nine. The nine had subparts to them, but we arrived at nine fundamental recommendations. I would have liked it to be only five, but everybody had their own pet items that they wanted to make sure got in, which was a product of their own experience and investigative work for the past several months. So everyone felt fully invested in it.
“So we could only get down so far. Still in all, that’s not bad. I’ve seen other reports, and they have a hundred recommendations. A report with a hundred recommendations doesn’t mean anything.
“Two or three of our recommendations related to NASA as an organization. [Recommendation II concerned NASA management structure, and Recommendation V dealt with improved communications. Recommendation III involved criticality review and hazard analysis.] I think those were taken to heart. It seemed to me at the time that NASA was going to try to implement everything that was said.”
As for Chuck Yeager, “He came once, for the first meeting. Chairman Rogers was very concerned that Yeager might not sign the final report because he had no basis for signing it, really. I believe Bill Rogers sent him a copy of the signature page to sign and return by mail.”
As for Richard Feynman’s famous Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Inquiry, contrary to stories that the commission tried hard to suppress its publication (because it was allegedly “anti-NASA”), Armstrong was okay with the colorful physicist expressing his unique take on the subject and attaching it to the commission’s final report as an appendix, as long as Chairman Rogers was.
Armstrong knew the truth of what Richard Feynman wrote at the end of his Minority Report, because he had been living and breathing it ever since he first took flight in an airplane forty years earlier: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
On Saturday morning, February 1, 2003, a morning phone call from a friend drove Armstrong to the television in his study. Another Space Shuttle was lost. Just minutes before its scheduled landing at the Cape, STS-107, Columbia, had come to pieces over Texas, high in the Earth’s atmosphere, following a sixteen-day mission to the International Space Station.
As soon as Neil heard reports that debris was being found, “I knew at that point the vehicle was lost. There was no chance.” Another tragic loss of a crew of astronauts: Rick Husband, the commander; Willie McCool, the pilot; five mission specialists: Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Mike Anderson, David Brown, and Ilan Roman, payload specialist.
The seventy-three-year-old former test pilot and astronaut watched TV for the rest of the day as did millions of other deeply saddened Americans. The height at which the Columbia had been ripped apart was a little over thirty-nine miles. Neil could not help but ponder the irony that the Shuttle had broken up at almost exactly the same height as his highest flight in the X-15—207,500 feet.
A few reporters tried to reach him, and Neil agreed to do an interview with a woman from his hometown paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. “People should not jump to conclusions about how this happened,” he told her. “The first impression is usually wrong. These things take time. Nobody wants to know the answers more quickly than those who run the Shuttle program. They will be working with as much speed as possible.
“It is a sad day. You don’t want to hear this. There is a great deal of grief.”
This time around there was no phone call asking him to serve on a presidential panel; the investigation would be handled very differently—more internally within NASA. Instead the Bush White House telephoned to ask if Neil and Carol, Neil’s second wife, would attend the memorial service for the Columbia crew, scheduled for Monday, February 3, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which they quickly agreed to do. The day that the country paid its respects to the lost astronauts was seventeen years to the day after Armstrong had arrived at Bill Rogers’s New York office to begin the Challenger investigation.
“We like to think that we are immortal as a species and we will keep going. But if that’s true, we are going to have to increase the number of options we have for survival.
“If our striving, if our decision to do it, is based on a threat like incoming asteroids, epidemic diseases, or other catastrophic scenarios like that, if that’s what’s driving us, then we will recognize and know why we are doing it. But it might be that we won’t recognize we are doing it for other reasons, perhaps not even explicitly for science or for industrial development.”
The United States should recognize “a lot of persuasive reasons why we could benefit from a return visit” to the Moon. “It’s reachable. We know it’s reachable. We know what it takes to do it. Long before the beginning of the Apollo program, sometime right after the birth of NASA in 1958, someone said that the Moon was the best space objective for mankind because if we could go to the Moon, we would have solved all the essential elements of spaceflight, which are leaving one gravitational system and going into another and landing on another body in a new environment. If you could do that, by the same token you could go anywhere. In that sense, I think travel back and forth between Earth and the Moon remains our first objective.”
The idea of space tourism does not provide a reliable foundation, however, on which to build and coordinate a national space program, in Armstrong’s view. “I am suspicious of space tourism being the winning model because, in my view, the reliability of the technology has not developed to the point where the model could survive after a few catastrophes, though I don’t object to its advocates trying to build that kind of a model and trying to make it work.
“We know that we can go to Mars—we’ve done it with probes. It is my belief that we can go there with humans and that we could do it now. We could go straight away. We probably do need to know a little bit more about the radiation protection requirements for a trip of that duration. When you are away from a large body—either the Earth or the Moon—you don’t have the protection. The Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field shields us. What there is of the lunar atmosphere provides some shielding. But in free space going to Mars, we are going to be encountering a radiation environment from a complete sphere and that is impactin
g us from all directions.
“We know a lot about what that flux is. But we don’t have a high confidence level yet in our knowledge of just what the appropriate level of protection is for humans for that kind of environment, for that duration. That needs more study.
“Going back to the Moon makes sense, not as another ‘flying-the-flag’ project but rather as a slowly evolving, steady progression of scientific understanding and engineering knowledge.”
In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced a “new vision” for the U.S. space program. The president proposed a commitment to a long-term human and robotic program to explore the solar system, starting with a return to the Moon that, in the view of the White House, “will ultimately enable future exploration of Mars and other destinations.” Two months later, Armstrong, in Houston to accept the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement, lent his support to the Bush plan. “Our president has introduced a new initiative with renewed emphasis on the exploration of our solar system and expansion of human frontiers. This proposal has substantial merit and promise. Our economy can afford an effort of this magnitude, but the public must believe the benefits to society deserve the investment. We know the advancement of knowledge and the rate of progress is proportional to the risk encountered…. The success of the endeavor will also be dependent on the degrees to which the aerospace community, government, industry, and academia can coalesce their forces and converge on a common goal.”
Later in 2004, Armstrong was asked to testify at congressional hearings on the Bush space plan, but prior commitments precluded it. He did do a voice-over narration of a NASA video report on the plan.
There have been many critics of the Bush plan both inside and outside the space community, but Neil’s philosophy, even before knowing all of the details of the proposal, has been to favor anything that moves the technology forward. In June 2004, he commented: “I know that some people think going back to the Moon would be a mistake and that we should target Mars for a human landing right now. I don’t argue against the merits of that, because I’m a Mars enthusiast myself. Nevertheless I think those of us in the aerospace world have to take the opportunities where we find them. I am a great believer in the fact that you make progress built on other progress.”
First Man Page 76