“You presented the correct data and blew the whistle,” another listener wrote. “You are not a loser. You are a challenger.”
Again, Ebeling wasn’t moved. So I asked him if there’s something more he wanted to hear.
“You aren’t NASA. You aren’t Thiokol,” he said. “I hadn’t heard any of those people.”
Kathy noted that neither Thiokol nor NASA had contacted her dad since deep depression prompted his retirement shortly after the Challenger disaster.
“He’s never gotten confirmation that he did do his job and he was a good worker and he told the truth,” Kathy said.
.. But some retired participants in that decision are still alive, including 78-year-old Allan McDonald, who was Ebeling’s boss at the time and a leader of the effort to postpone the launch. He called Ebeling right away.
.. “You and your colleagues did everything that was expected of you,” Hardy wrote. “The decision was a collective decision made by several NASA and Thiokol individuals. You should not torture yourself with any assumed blame.”
Hardy closed with a promise to pray for Ebeling’s physical and emotional health. “God bless you,” he wrote.
The note from Hardy and the phone call from McDonald seemed to be a turning point. It was two weeks now after the Challenger story, and Kathy had been reading letter after letter every day. Sitting in his big easy chair in his living room, Ebeling’s eyes and mood seemed brighter.
.. “I know that is the truth that my burden has been reduced,” he said. “I can’t say it’s totally gone, but I can certainly say it’s reduced.”
30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself
Thirty years ago, as the nation mourned the loss of seven astronauts on the space shuttle Challenger, Bob Ebeling was steeped in his own deep grief.
The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.
That night, he told his wife, Darlene, “It’s going to blow up.”
When Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, Ebeling and his colleagues sat stunned in a conference room at Thiokol’s headquarters outside Brigham City, Utah. They watched the spacecraft explode on a giant television screen and they knew exactly what had happened.