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In the 1980s Roger Boisjoly worked as an engineer at Morton Thiokol, maker of the solid rocket boosters used in the space shuttle program

||||||||||||. In 1985, a year before the space shuttle Challenger disaster, Boisjoly had been warning Thiokol that the joints used to seal the sections of the solid rocket boosters could fail if they became too cold before launch.||||||||||||||||||

The space shuttle used two solid fuel rocket boosters and a central hydrogen gas tank, to fuel the engines for launch. The different sections of the solid rocket boosters were sealed to one another with a rubber material or gasket called an “o-ring.” Boisjoly and other Thiokol engineers had found that in cold weather conditions, the rubber material in the o-rings became brittle and did not seal the sections into place. In this case, the o-ring would fail to prevent the flames from reaching the rocket’s metal casing. If this happened, the flames could trigger a huge explosion of the hydrogen fuel tank located right next to the boosters.

On January 27, 1986 the space shuttle Challenger was on the launch pad set for launch the following day. The weather forecast for Cape Canaveral was to be unusually cold with temperatures dropping below freezing. All of that evening and into the morning hours of January 28, Boisjoly and other engineers pleaded with NASA to delay the launch. Senior managers at Thiokol and NASA officials rejected their argument. NASA insisted the shuttle would launch the morning of January 28 as scheduled, even with the cold weather. Only a minute after taking off, the o-ring on one of the solid fuel rocket boosters failed just as Boisjoly had predicted it would. The flames shot out from the booster and hit the hydrogen tank, which exploded, killing all of the astronauts on board. Boisjoly was so sure that the booster o-rings would fail, he could not make himself watch the launch.

The resulting investigation of the Challenger disaster showed NASA had developed an internal culture that all but ignored safety. It was a culture that pushed to launch the Challenger to meet the schedule and keep politicians happy. Astronaut safety took a back seat to NASA and Washington DC politics.

For his testimony exposing NASA and Thiokol, the space engineering community blackballed Boisjoly. He spent the last 17 years of his life lecturing on engineering ethics. In 2003 when an unchanged NASA culture caused the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia, Boisjoly stated that NASA engineers and administrators should be charged with murder and the only way to change the NASA culture was to throw people in jail.