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Hearings Relative to the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger Accident

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Hearings Relative to the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger Accident INVESTIGATION OF THE CHALLENGER ACCIDENT (Volume 2) TUESDAY, JULY 15, 1986 HOUSEOF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEEON SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY, Washington, DC. The committee met, pursuant to recess, at 9:35 a.m., in room 2318, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Robert A. Roe (acting chairman of the committee), presiding. Mr. ROE.The committee will come to order. Today we continue our series of hearings relative to the Rogers Commission report on the Challenger accident. We have heard from numerous organizations and people from NASA and other parties that have a measure of involvement in the Shuttle Pro- gram. We are now at a stage where it is appropriate that we hear from three of the principal contractors responsible for developing space shuttle flight hardware. We want to obtain their independent assessments of the Rogers Commission’s conclusions regarding flight hardware, and we want to hear about whatever recertification efforts they are engaged in. Above all, we want to understand what is being done to correct design deficiencies and improve operating performances of flight hardware. In the communication that was sent to our witnesses today there were a number-for the benefit of the committee-there were a number of items that were listed as key issues. And, for the record, each contractor’s assessment of the work and the conclusions of the Rogers Commission as it related to their space flight hardware; what efforts each contractor has underway to recertify their flight hardware; how each contractor identified and responded to in- stances of anomalous performance by their flight hardware prior to 51-L; what is being done now by each contractor to correct design deficiencies or improve operating performance margins for their flight hardware; and finally, but not all-inclusive, each contractor’s estimates of the time that will be required to complete the above tasks and have their flight hardware ready to reinstitute flight op- erations. We will hear this morning from Mr. George Jeffs, president, North American Space Operations, Rockwell International; Mr. Richard Davis, president, Martin Marietta Michoud Aerospace; and George Murphy, executive vice president and general manager, United Technology Booster Production Co. And we want to wel- come our witnesses this morning. (1) 2 Before I call upon our first witness, I would defer to our distin- guished ranking minority member, Mr. Manuel Lujan from New Mexico. Mr. LUJAN.Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have an opening statement; I just want to welcome our witnesses today. I suppose my observations or my questions today would have to do more with, where do we go from here? I think we’ve gone through what happened and we all quite well understand it, and I guess the im- portant question now is, where do we go from here to get back into the space business? Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. ROE. I thank the distinguished gentleman. I would ask unanimous consent, and without objection, that tele- vision broadcasts, radio broadcasts, still photography, other means of coverage will be permitted during the full committee hearings this week on the Rogers Commission report. No objection; so or- dered. Now, if our three distinguished witnesses would rise and raise their right hand and repeat after me, I would appreciate their being sworn in at this point. [Whereupon, the witnesses were duly sworn.] Thank you, gentlemen. Now the Chair recognizes Mr. George Jeffs, president, North American Space Operations. Mr. Jeffs, we have your testimony but I think none of the testimony is-you’ve done a good job in summa- rizing, so I think it would be profitable for the committee and for the record to do your full testimony as presented, if you don’t mind. Mr. Jeffs, we recognize you first. STATEMENT OF GEORGE JEFFS, PRESIDENT, NORTH AMERICAN SPACE OPERATIONS, ROCKWELL INTERNATIONAL, EL SE- GUNDO, CA Mr. JEFFS.Well, Chairman Roe, members of the committee, I ap- preciate the opportunity to be here today with you. I have submitted a statement for the record. I would like to add some supplemental comments to that, if I may. I am a corporate officer of Rockwell International. I run the space and energy business segments for that company. We have about six divisions in space and energy; among them are the Space Transportation Systems Division and the Rocketdyne Division. The Space Transportation Systems Division is accountable for the orbit- er design, fabrication, test, and support, along with the integration. Rocketdyne, on the other hand, is responsible for the design, fabri- cation, test, and support of the shuttle main engines. I was a program manager on the support program for Gemini. I was the chief engineer of the Apollo CSM programs; I was a pro- gram manager of the Apollo programs for the Apcllo-Soyuz pro- grams, the lunar science programs, and the skylab programs, and I was the shuttle program manager from the beginning of Rockwell until about 1976 when I assumed my present job. I am also a long- term, many-year pilot so I have easy and complete empathy with flight safety. 3 Our review-which, as you might expect, has been done in great detail-of the Commission findings has led us to the conclusion that that effort by the committee was well done. They certainly consummated their charter. They identified the failure sources and the associated causal factors. We also, of course, during that proc- ess identified other areas that relate to all of our hardware, and we have looked at those with a fine-tooth comb. I think one of the things that the Commission review has done for us in an overall sense that I think is very healthy is that it has brought about a new re-review of the total program, to have us go back and relook at our requirements and the certification testing that we’ve done, the design, basically, to meet those requirements in light of our flight experiences. I think that’s a very healthy thing for the program at this time. It turns out that most of the items that were identified by the Commission were in work before 51-L. Most of them were in the form of margin improvers, and I believe that most of them are in- corporable before the next launch, which Dr. Fletcher the other day mentioned as being in the early part of 1988. That’s with the exception of the escape system, which I’ll talk about in just a little more detail in a moment. The 17-inch valves have been a subject we’ve been working on for some time. Those valves, as you know, have to remain open in flight to feed the engines. If they inadvertently close it’s a critical- ity-1 type of failure. On the other hand, they’ve got to close at the end of flight in order to make sure that we don’t have external forces that would cause potential recontact of the bodies at separa- tion. We have some design ideas about how to put a positive lock on those valves which essentially fly in the LOX flow and the hydro- gen flow during the engine operations. They’re like little airfoils in there. We have a lock design that looks good. On the other hand, we want to be doubly careful of adding anything additional to that oxygen flow in the way of any kind of loose parts that might come-that might give us any sort of trouble in that flow stream. So that design has to be looked at from all angles, and we’re doing that. Nonetheless, we believe that that system is qualifiable to the flow rates consistent with 109 percent engine operation, which es- sentially sets the flow rates prior to the next flight. We’ve been working on the brakes for some time. The steering problems, so-called, are not really problems. The steering system is a single-string system; it was meant in the first place to be a backup system, but with the requirements of minimizing the load on the brakes, it’s necessary that the steering system play a more active role. We are looking at redundancy in the steering system and the electronics in the steering system, in the electricals, and also in the hydraulics. You can only take this so far because it gets back single-string into the APU’s, so we’re looking at how we pro- vide adequate redundancy in the steering system so that the crews themselves will have confidence in its workability to essentially unload the brakes. We, as you know, in this system don’t have the advantages of thrust reversal and things like that that you have with the big airplanes, so we have to slow this system down other- wise, and mostly that load falls on the brakes. If we can handle the 4 steering, that prevents us from having to use differential brakes to keep the airplane on the runway. The steering system is, I think, easily doable to provide the redundancy that I believe will be ac- ceptable across the board. The brakes-we are adding capability to the brakes. The brakes are designed for about 42 million foot-pounds. You can get various energy absorption capabilities out of them, depending on how you use the brakes; but we are increasing that capability to about 65 million foot-pounds now, which should provide us with adequacy for cross-wind landings at recovery sites. We are doing that by in- creasing the stiffness of the axles and by essentially beefing up the thickness of the staters on the brakes.
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