ABSTRACT

Yet, with respect to the question of safety, managers apparently sometimes ignore this connection. This fact is dramatically illustrated by an analysis of the catastrophe of the US spacecraft Challenger in 1986, when 73 seconds after takeoff from Cape Canaveral the manned spaceship exploded and seven astronauts lost their lives. The direct cause was a brittle rubber sealing ring which, in accordance with the predictions and warnings of the engineers from the rocket manufacturer Morton Thiokol, cracked under low temperature conditions. One day before takeoff the engineers, in particular Allen MacDonald, the project leader, and Roger Boisjoly, the expert on sealing rings in rocketry, had warned and protested against takeoff plans for the next day. They informed NASA about the danger that the sealing rings would break below the freezing point. They were supported by the Deputy Director of the engineering department of the rocketry firm, Robert Lund, who also informed Jerry Mason, a superordinate engineer within the same firm. Mason, however, silenced Lund and ended the discussion with the words ‘Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat’. Lund gave in and consented to takeoff, which was notified to the project leader of NASA, who authorised the takeoff without any reservations resulting in the catastrophic accident. (Later, the engineers who had launched the warnings, MacDonald and Boisjoly, were transferred to another department, which they deemed a kind of quasi-punishment.)

(cf. Lenk and Maring 1995a: 33) Do indeed managers decide differently than engineers? Do their decisions rest upon a different set of criteria? Regarding ethical decisions, does the management hat differ from the engineering hat? In any case, this example demonstrates how complicated the problems of responsibility, its interpretation and its distribution are: Who was the responsible person or body in this case? Everybody who had been involved? Just NASA, not a single individual? Each to a certain degree? How much, then? (cf. below). Before dealing with

these questions, we will first turn to issues of defining and delineating responsibility in general.