In the article, “Challenger Disaster: Heeding the Ethical Lessons 30 Years Ago”, the story behind why the space shuttle Challenger burst into flames and what happened in the back ground is told. On that day, sorrowfully, seven people were killed including a teacher who was supposed to be the first civilian to go into space. The worst part is the explosion could have been avoided if only the managers at NASA had listened to the engineers. The main factor that was responsible for the explosion was the temperature in Florida on Jan. 28, 1986. When the Challenger was launched, it was a very cold 26 degrees. This led to the O-ring hardening negating its purpose to protect the joint from the 5800-degree gases in the booster. Hence, it lost the ability to form a perfect seal. When this happened, the gases leaked which led to a hot gas blow-by erosion causing the explosion. …show more content…
Roger Boisjoly, the engineer having the head authority about seals and joints, and Alan McDonald, who was the manager of the Thiokol’s solid rocket motor program, were the main people being questioned. They were called whistle-blowers by many people which is someone who expounds information that is unethical about a company to the public. Throughout the investigation Boisjoly was open about what happened. He was concerned NASA was not telling the truth and hoped honesty would help so the real problem would be fixed. Before going into court, the company’s lawyers told him to only answer with yes or no. However, later he made them very mad when he gave the court his
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States of America. This tropical storm rendered much of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama a flooded wasteland; in particular, Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana was sequestered by the floods, leaving hundreds of patients, staff, and visitors without vital resources. Electricity was cut off, and the internal temperatures reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as reported by journalist Sheri Fink (2009). Staff attempted to evacuate the hospital, carrying patients one-by-one down many flights of stairs. Several patients died during this evacuation. In the wake of the flood, it was discovered that 45 patients of Memorial Hospital had perished, and that 23 of these deaths were attributed to a lethal dose of Versed or morphine. Dr Anna Pou, a surgeon on duty during the disaster, was accused of euthanizing these patients during
Critical Response: Given the three possible responses from the book, I feel like #2 is the most ethical of the three. However, I feel like all three aren’t satisfactory ways to treat this situation. I will analyze them one by one, then give my opinion of what the salesperson should do.
While seated in the Oval Office of the White House, January 28, 1986 President Ronald Reagan delivers his speech The Challenger Disaster hours after the space shuttle The Challenger explodes while in take off. Thousands witnessed this horrifying event live, in person and on television. This mission was very unique, allowing the first civilian to ever be allowed in space during a mission. She was aboard The Challenger as an observer in the NASA Teacher in Space Program. Ironically, nineteen years before this disaster, three astronauts were tragically lost in an accident on the ground.
The Ins and Outs of Ethics is a Business Week Online magazine article from May 13, 2001, it was written by Eric Wahlgren. In the article he interviews Michael Rion, the author of The Responsible Manager. Rion is also a leading business ethics advisor who consults many Standard and Poor’s 500 companies. In the article Wahlgren asks Rion why it is important for businesses to have a high ethical standard. In his responses, Rion explains that effective organizations utilize ethics programs to clearly define ethical expectations, resolve ethical issues quickly, and to remove moral constraints. Additionally, employees who understand how to deal with ethical dilemmas will also be more productive and have strong core values to guide them. According to scripture, Rions concepts are biblically sound, relevant, and desirable, proving that ethical organizational behavior is shaped and influenced by sound ethical principles.
NASA has faced many tragedies during their time; but one can question if two of the tragedies were preventable by changing some critical decisions made by the organization. The investigation board looking at the decisions made for the space shuttle tragedies of the Columbia and Challenger noted that the “loss resulted as much from organizational as from technical failures” (Bolman & Deal, 2008, p. 191). The two space shuttle tragedies were about twenty years apart, they both had technical failures but politics also played a factor in to these two tragedies.
Even though there were many factors contributing to the Challenger disaster, the most important issue was the lack of an effective risk management plan. The factors leading to the Challenger disaster are:
scandal, and the story soon dissipated. The pentagon had footage of the crash and when they
Collins and Pinch draw a distinctive line between what actually happened and the public’s perspective on what happened. The public had a compulsive desire to create a moral lesson and provide heroes and villains. Many people misconstrued this as a conflict between the knowledgeable engineers and the greedy management. The public believed that NASA and Thiokol’s managers were ignorant to the engineering, but this is not true, since they were all engineers before their promotion to management. The authors stress the phrase “after the event” to show that hindsight bias is contributing to the public’s view on what actually happened. The physicist, Richard Feynman, awed the public with a demonstration of putting rubber, the material of the O-ring, in icy water. Th...
NASA claimed that it did not know of Thiokol's (contractor responsible for the construction and maintenance of the shuttle's SRBs) earlier concerns about the effects of the cold weather on the O-rings, and did not understand that Rockwell International ( the shuttle's prime contractor ) viewed the large amount of ice present on the pad as a constraint to launch. For reasons that are unclear, Thiokol management reversed itself , and recommended that the launch proceed as scheduled NASA ( did not ask why) . Ebeling ( An Engineer who warned of shuttle disaster ) told his wife that night that Challenger would blow
Two tragic incidents, the Challenger Space Shuttle crash of 1986, and the Three Mile Island near meltdown of 1979, have greatly devastated our nation. Both these disasters involved failures of communication among ordinary professional people, working in largely bureaucratic companies. Two memos called the “Smoking Gun Memos,” authored by R. M. Boisjoly, of Morton Thiokol, and D. F. Hallman, of Babcook and Wilcox, will always be associated these two incidents. Unfortunately, neither of these memos were successful in preventing the accidents of the Challenger and the Three Mile Island near meltdown.
The aerospace industry is fairly new in our day in age. It has been recorded in history that the first flight ever by man took place in Kitty Hawk, NC roughly 100 years ago. Since that first model, drastic improvements have been made in aerospace technology. Aerospace has evolved from simple prop planes to sound barrier breaking jets and even to space shuttles. The very definition of aerospace in the adjective or active form is “of or relating to aerospace, to vehicles used in aerospace or the manufacture of such vehicles, or to travel in aerospace.” In general, aerospace deals with any dynamic manufactured vehicle that travels above the surface of the earth. This, as you might expect, leaves two possibilities, the atmosphere or our earth, and outer space. Such basic examples of aerospace vehicles are Cessna planes, Black Hawk helicopters, Goodyear blimps and the Columbia Space Shuttle. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, aerospace has and will continue to be an integrated part of our society.
Even though people knew what had happened, they didn't know why it had happened. Gradually people found the answer. Here's why it happened: the rocket booster's casing was made in different sections. These sections were attached to each other and sealed together with o-rings-rubber rings. The o-rings were held in their places by the pressure of the hot gasses, which were from the rocket booster after it was ignited. On previous missions of the Challenger, the o-rings were found to be worn away by the hot gasses. The o-rings had been tested and the results had shown that the o-rings were a lot more likely to fail in cold or freezing weather. That was what happened on the cold morning of January 28, 1986.
I chose to write about Lt. Michael Patrick Murphy from Operation Red Wings. Lt. Michael Patrick Murphy was a United States Navy Seal who was awarded the highest military decoration known as the Medal of Honor. He was the first member of the United States Navy to receive the award since Vietnam War. Lt. Michael Patrick Murphy’s heroic actions inspired author Patrick Robinson to write the book known as Lone Survivor that eventually turned into a hit movie in 2013.
08 May 2017. This resource detailed many different people’s reactions to the Challenger’s explosion, including high school students, family members of the astronauts, and people working at NASA. I gained insight on the way many different types of people felt about the experience and noticed that all those that were interviewed seemed somewhat in shock and confused about the explosion. I also learned the specific date and time of the explosion and exactly how long the shuttle took to explode.
Ethical dilemmas create a challenge between two or more equally alternative problems requiring moral judgment. This creates both an obligation and dilemma for those involved. Living in such a globalized world with cross-cultural borders, races, and ideas; negotiating what is considered morally “right” can sometimes be very difficult. Both religion and laws have a major impact in ethical duties. What an individual may presume as right cannot be guaranteed by the government or political party. The Overcrowded Lifeboat is just one example in which all the ideas above come to play in ethical decisions.