Bob Ebeling; warned of Challenger risk

"Why me?" This is what Bob Ebeling planned to demand of God when he saw him: "Why me? You picked a loser."

For three decades, Mr. Ebeling, a former rocket engineer for NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, had been swamped by his own grief and guilt over the catastrophe he had failed to stop.

In the days before the space shuttle Challenger burned up in midair, killing all seven astronauts on board, Mr. Ebeling and four other engineers had pleaded with NASA to delay the launch. They had concerns about whether the rubber O-rings on the shuttle's booster rockets would seal properly in the frigid winter weather.

Mr. Ebeling even authored an alarmed memo detailing the problems with the rings. Its subject line read, bluntly, "Help!" But the engineers were overruled.

On Jan. 28, 1986, he and his colleagues watched in helpless horror as the shuttle and its crew turned to ashes in the sky.

"I think that was one of the mistakes that God made," Mr. Ebeling told NPR this year. "He shouldn't have picked me for that job. I don't know."

But hundreds of people who listened to that interview, which aired on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger explosion in January, disagreed. They included Allan McDonald, Mr. Ebeling's boss and Thiokol's representative at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the day of the launch.

"I called [Mr. Ebeling] up and told him, 'You know, to me, my definition of a loser is somebody that really doesn't do anything, but worse yet, they don't care,' " McDonald told NPR a month later. "I said, 'You did something, and you really cared. That's the definition of a winner.' "

Mr. Ebeling died Monday in Brigham City, Utah, at age 89, his family said. But, thanks in part to the assurances from McDonald and untold others, he goes to God less burdened by the question that has haunted him for the last 30 years.

"It was as if he got permission from the world," his daughter Leslie Ebeling Serna told NPR. "He was able to let that part of his life go."

Mr. Ebeling is survived by his wife, Darlene, and 35 descendants spanning four generations.

The Illinois native had lived in Brigham City for more than half a century. He was a quiet, prayerful man - a husband, a devoted father, a great lover of the outdoors. He spent his free time birding, biking, and boating in the vast wetland not too far from the Thiokol plant where he worked, he told the Salt Lake Tribune.

But he knew sorrow, too. In the years before the Challenger explosion, his son had committed suicide, Mr. Ebeling told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. At the time, Mr. Ebeling had cradled the young man in his arms and wondered why he hadn't done more to prevent his death.

It was a question he'd soon be asking himself again.

In 1985, booster rockets recovered from the Jan. 24 launch of the shuttle Discovery showed signs of seal problems. Mr. Ebeling, who had been working in engineering for 40 years, and two other engineers were assigned to examine the issue. Their findings were worrying - the rubber o-ring seals stiffened in cold weather, allowing the hot, high pressure gas inside the boosters to leak out - but NASA and their managers at Thiokol were slow to react.

All seven astronauts on board died: Commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialist Ellison Onizuka, mission specialist Judith Resnik, mission specialist Ronald McNair, payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, and "teacher in space" Christa McAuliffe.