30 years on: Lessons from Challenger

I’ve blogged before about the events of that morning from my perspective, fresh out of college and starting my life’s dream of working with NASA. Little did I know how much that one event would serve as a springboard for so much of my life, creating ripples in the pond of my existence – personally and professionally.

We don’t really need to go over the technical details of the Accident. The specifics of the design flaws, the clearly-missed warning signs, and the well-out-of-bounds launch conditions were all there, in perfect 20/20 hindsight… and, to be perfectly honest, even 30 years later, it’s really tough for me to watch those videos.

At its core, though — spaceflight, and especially manned spaceflight, is an unforgiving field. The consequences for failure are immediate and often spectacular, with the results that can lead to the loss of vehicle and crew.

Being a part of that recovery period and the eventual Return-to-Flight provided some lifelong lessons that still resonate today. So, let’s talk about it in that frame of reference…

1. To instill within ourselves these qualities essential to professional excellence:

Professional excellence leads to, in my opinion and experience, a personal excellence that is mandatory for a complete life experience. The qualities, listed below, were forged by the early leaders of Mission Control and honed by a white-hot fire in what Gene Kranz called the “Leadership Laboratory” of Mission Control.

I’ve translated this, personally, into my “second career” after the Shuttle Program as a Project Management Consultant. I’ve now had more years as a PM than I actually did in the Trench!

But, that discipline of knowing when to lead the team, and when to allow the team to excel in each of their own individual strengths, has been crucial in my life.

We would train for many times longer than the actual spaceflight event would take, in order to guarantee that our competence was honed to a razor-sharp edge. If you were not deemed competent, then you would not be allowed to step foot into that hallowed cathedral of spaceflight operations.

Again, this has translated into my personal and professional lives directly by not ever accepting mediocrity. The old adage of “a job worth doing, is a job worth doing well” rings true.

If we weren’t confident in ourselves, how could others be confident in us? That *CANNOT*, however, lead to a false sense of ability. Confidence without competence is a recipe for disaster … and was quickly weeded out.

Actions have consequences.

Responsibility for your actions also means responsibilities for the results. And failure to take action is, in and of itself, can also have consequences for which you can be held responsible!

Awareness of this, acceptance that you cannot shift your responsibilities to someone else, and being willing to stand up for the end results of what you have or have not done is critical to being a successful person, both personally and professionally.

When you know, deep down, that the path you are taking is the right one, then showing that fortitude and toughness will eventually work in your favor. This lesson has proven itself, time and again, in both aspects of my life, personal and professional. The willingness to stand your ground for what is right and true will reflect through your personality and others will gravitate towards it.

This is often the most difficult thing to do, and probably one that I fail at more than I want to admit.

This element was added after the Columbia accident in 2003.

It really captures a thought that we should never “just be complacent because things seem to be going well.”  In other words, there may be problems and issues brewing beneath the surface that you may not be looking for, or worse – knowing about and ignoring them because they haven’t caused a problem … yet.  Be attentive to all aspects of what you do.  Some event or pattern that may not result in an issue today, may end up being a catastrophic problem in the future.  I’ll discuss in a bit, when we talk about “error chains.”

2. To always be aware that suddenly and unexpectedly we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.

3. To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in the trying we do not give it our best effort.

“Failure is not an option” is an oft-used phrase describing the Apollo 13 events and Mission Control in general… but, failure is an unavoidable part of human existence.

As much as any person can prepare for events, there will always be times when external events just prevent success. Of course, with any failure comes the opportunity to learn from that mistake and equally important – to not make that same mistake again. Repeating mistakes, while that may occur more than we want to see, has to be avoided.

During our Shuttle mission simulations, we were thrown into situations where we would almost certainly make mistakes.

Experiencing and recognizing those failures, but then learning what we did and how to not repeat them in the future made the actual missions so successful. Not only had we seen so many failure scenarios during training, but we also had learned the critical evaluation and recognition skills to help prepare us avoid them in real-time.

Although it’s been 30 years now, those Lessons from Challenger are still resonating with me.

I would love to hear yours… drop me a line or comment below.

NOTE: On the 35th anniversary (January 28, 2021), I updated this post to include the 7th element “Vigilance” that was added after the Columbia accident.