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Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells Caernarfon Castle Caernarfon was just as impressive. It was built with an hourglass shape that divides the inner grounds into two wards. It has only a single massive wall with ten towers spaced around its periphery. A lot of restoration work has gone into this castle because in addition to being a fortress it was built originally to be the official residence of the Prince of Wales. It no longer serves that function, but it was the site of the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969. The castle houses a museum, the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum, an arms exhibit, and a ‘Princes of Wales’ exhibit. None of the other castles we visited, excepting of course the Tower of London, were in as good a state of restoration of Caernarfon. Most were like Caerphilly or worse. The wooden floors and living quarters of these castles have long since rotted away and the great towers have only a big hole right down through the middle flanked with stonework on all sides. Still it was, naturally, irresistible to me to climb the long spiraling stone stairs of the towers to see the view from their very tops. Most now have rope banisters to hang on to during the climb, but in their day these stairways did not have this safety feature. The stone steps were small and it’s hard to see how an armor clad man could bound up them all that quickly. By the time I would get to the top I’d be feeling pretty winded from the climb. At one stop I was huffing and puffing after climbing to the top of a sixty foot tower and wondering a bit if I was getting old or something. Just then a British family with a little boy, who was probably eleven or twelve, came up the stairway from behind me. On reaching the top, the boy turned to his ‘mummy’ and gasped out, “I’m shattered!” which is the Brits’ slang for saying ‘I’m exhausted.’ I felt better after hearing this. I really loved England and Wales, and the tiny piece of Scotland I had time to see, and my days in Great Britain passed all too quickly. I would have dearly loved to have seen Ireland as well, but there just wasn’t time to go everywhere I wanted to go and see everything I wanted to see. Even after all these years I keep telling myself I have to go back there some day. But by mid-August I’d been away from home for a month and it was time to come back to Boise. So ended the greatest vacation I’ve ever had. In January of 1986 we were still putting the finishing touches on Eagle. On January 28th I was on my way back to my desk from one of our analytical laboratories when Mitch’s secretary stopped me in the hallway. She was upset and distressed. “Did you hear about the space shuttle?” she asked. That was how I learned Challenger had exploded barely a minute after launch, killing all seven astronauts. Like millions of people, I was mesmerized watching the news replays of the launch and the explosion. To this day I can’t find adequate words to describe my feelings. Shock, yes. Depression, yes. A deep inner sadness, yes. A sense of anger that continued to grow in the weeks that followed as more details about the accident came to light, yes. But none of these words really do justice to how I felt inside. I could remember the overwhelming pride in my profession – engineering – and in my country I had felt when Craig and I watched Columbia’s first landing in April of 1981. Even in the midst of all the many problems and troubles with which America has to come to grips, the grand and inspiring accomplishments of NASA and the space program had always served as a most splendid example of what America can do when we put our collective efforts as a free people together to work for a common goal. Now in a devastating instant came the worst possible failure imaginable. When the Apollo 1 fire had claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee it had been an awful tragedy but it had, 286 Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells after all, happened at a time when Apollo was little more than a very dangerous and experimental vehicle and it had been caused by a cascade of small, individual mistakes and errors that had avalanched in the worst way possible. When the oxygen tank had exploded during the moon flight of Apollo 13 the incredible and heroic efforts of all the NASA people in bringing the astronauts safely home seemed to me and to many others a confirmation of the skill, care, and professionalism of America’s space program. It really made it seem to me and to many others that something like Challenger simply could not happen to us. Not this way. Not during a launch. Not in the way it had happened. Not from what was so obviously a fundamental design flaw and, as we all learned later, culpable negligence on the part of NASA and NASA contractor administrators and managers. When the latter came to light six months later after the report of the Rogers’ Commission was published I was shocked and very, very angry. I thought it was clear from the very beginning, in watching those news replays, that something in the solid rocket booster was the root cause of the disaster. You don’t have to be Wernher von Braun to know flames aren’t supposed to spurt out of the sides of a rocket engine. The pictures of this happening were particularly hard on my friend Jan. Her father – who was also my friend – worked at Morton Thiokol, the contractor who designed and built the solid rocket boosters. As everyone now knows, the accident was caused by the rubber O-rings placed in the rocket motor specifically to prevent flaming gas – ‘blow by’ as NASA euphemistically called it – from escaping through the joints. When Nobel laureate Richard Feynman staged his dramatic demonstration during the Commission hearings that the O-ring material would fail to do its job when it got cold, the physics of the failure was suddenly exposed to be something so fundamental and obvious that the magnitude of the design failure defied comprehension. When it came to light that ‘blow-by’ had been observed on earlier shuttle flights, that the decision makers were aware of it, and that NASA and its contractors had been gambling all along with the lives of the shuttle astronauts, I was baffled and utterly furious. Why no one went to jail because of this is something I fail to understand right up to today. If a drunk gets behind the wheel of a car and kills somebody, he gets charged with vehicular homicide – murder. The people who knew about this design failure before January of 1986 weren’t drunk. They knew the danger in the light of cold sobriety. Despite what the press claimed, there are no heroes in this tragedy other than the seven people who lost their lives. There was only ethical bankruptcy all down the line from the top officials at NASA to the engineers who knew about the danger and failed to act effectively to stop the inevitable from happening. Jobs and careers – no matter whose – are not more important than lives. You see, there are always social consequences in the work engineers do. It isn’t often the case that lives are on the line in what most engineers do, but the social consequences are always there. Consider the comparatively tame nature of my own work for HP. Disk drives like those we manufactured are not sold into marketplaces where a disk drive failure puts lives at risk. The possibility of financial loss, yes; the possibility of great inconvenience, yes. But not the possibility of loss of lives. Those applications are – or should be – very special and even more reliability assurance precautions to mitigate against a single disk drive failure are taken. But social consequences of what I did for a living were there nonetheless. I was always keenly aware, for example, that the jobs and livelihoods of our production workers depended a great deal on the work my colleagues and I did. New products were the lifeblood of our company and if I failed to do my job with complete professionalism the people who would ultimately pay the biggest price would be the people who worked in the factory. I never once forgot what things had been like in Maquoketa when the Clinton Engines factory went bankrupt. I never once doubted the same thing could happen to any company. A company – especially a publicly-held stock corporation – doesn’t just belong to the shareholders, despite the avaricious and self-serving slogans of those predators we call investment bankers. It belongs also to the people who work there, without whom no company can be successful or survive. That’s what the word ‘company’ means. The word ‘incorporated’ means ‘united in a body.’ There is a social and moral contract implicit in every business organization and this contract is binding on everyone from owner to the guy who sweeps up at closing time. I know most business people today would deny this, but all such denials are self-serving and merely excuses.