“The Challenger to be Ethical”by:Kymber Berson English 401Professor Ron StricklandDecember 6, 2002BersonKymber BersonEnglish 401Dr. StricklandFinal PaperThe Challenger to be EthicalNo matter what area of work Americans are employed in today, most likely there will be technical communication responsibilities. Where this responsibility used to be reserved for those people specifically trained to deal with technical communication, it seems that today, everyone is a technical communicator. “We marvel at the latest computers, bring even more complex systems into our homes and job sites, agonize over the legal and ethical consequences of medical technology, and debate the environmental impact of agricultural technology” (Pattrow and Wresch 4). If so many people are becoming technical communicators, we need to have exceptional communication about technology to ensure we are making ethical decisions. In an article published in the Wisenet Journal, Jean Hollis Weber wrote about the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own actions. She discussed a regular ethics column run by The Society for Technical Communication (STC) in its national newsletter. The column’s purpose is to describe a typical situation that could happen in the workplace and then propose different possible solutions. Readers are invited to choose which options they would go along with or propose an original solution. STC publishes the responses in a later issue. What Weber said stood out as a result from these polls is “the dichotomy between knowing what’s right and wrong and applying that in situations where your job, or possibly even your life could be placed in jeopardy if you do the ‘right’ thing (Weber 2). It is the duty of a technical communicator to make ethical 2Bersondecisions and take responsibility for any decisions that are made. This does not mean hiding behind what is legal, or requested; it is not ethically acceptable to say Joe Somebody told me to, I was only following orders, that’s not really my job, etc. “Emerging technologies mean that the law often is well behind the times; but we must make choices now, not wait for the law to catch up” (Weber 2).Some think that when there are discussions about ethics in technical areas, the only concerns are making sure not to plagiarize, but there are many more ethical dilemmas technical communicators face. In Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray, Lori Allen and Dan Voss start with a simple definition of ethics, “…doing what is right to achieve what is good” (5). The problem is that everyone can create their own definition of what right means and what good means. Following personal ethical concerns in the workplace that necessitate disagreeing with the team can be difficult. Even when conflicting concerns are presented, it can also be difficult to communicate well enough to convince colleagues to change their minds. If the team has different ideas about the main goal of the job is, (or what is good) they might not be communicating effectively to reach the same end result. What happens if an employee or employees of a team are unable to communicate well enough to convince the rest of their colleagues that there is a problem? In the case of the Space Shuttle Challenger this failure to communicate lead to a disaster resulting in the loss of seven innocent lives. These seven astronauts put their trust into NASA/the Marshal Space Flight Center, and Morton-Thiokol, but because these teams could not communicate efficiently, the mission of the Challenger shuttle ended in disaster.3BersonIt was shortly before noon on the morning of January 28, 1986. The eyes of the nation were on seven professional astronauts who were about to take flight on the Space Shuttle Challenger. One of these astronauts, Christa McAuliffe, caused special attention to this flight. Not only was she the payload specialist, McAuliffe was the first school teacher-astronaut, causing millions of school children to turn their attention to the Challenger. The morning was colder than any other launch in history, 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Flight 51-L lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:39 a.m. Within milliseconds of ignition, gasses from the right solid rocket booster began poring through a loose joint between sections of the booster. After one second into flight, smoke was visible and by 58 seconds flames were visible as well. At 65 seconds cryogenic liquid hydrogen rushed from the tank onto the burring gasses from the rocket; the shuttle began to break apart at 72 seconds. At 73.124 seconds the hydrogen tank exploded which caused disintegration of the intertank and liquid oxygen tank. The Challenger exploded in a huge white fireball (Presidential Commission, 1986).The shock of this event, experienced by such a great number of people, brought the nation together to grieve and question what had gone so wrong. The media played andreplayed these final seconds described above of the Challenger and its passengers from the launch, to the final seconds of the explosion, and then the aftermath. We saw the anguished faces of onlookers, adults and children alike, and then the investigation of the Presidential Commission. This was an event that could not simply be called an accident and let go. The disaster has mainly been called and remembered as a technical failure, buttechnology is not the only culprit. Examining the communication that preceded this event, it can be concluded there is more to this disaster. Had communication been more 4Bersonefficient during the years, months, days, and even hours preceding liftoff, this dreadful disaster could have been avoided.When the Presidential Commission, also called Rogers Commission, began their investigation, it was troubling to learn that a problem with the 0-rings was noticed and mentioned back in 1977. One problem was that while different teams worked on the Challenger, they did not consider their roles of communication as important as their roles in the production of the shuttle and getting it off the ground. Morton-Thiokol worked on the Challenger’s Solid Rocket Motor (SRM) and Marshal Space Center/NASA was the consumer.Engineers at the Marshal Space Flight Center had questioned the design of the solid rocket booster Morton-Thiokol was designing all along. Marshal was put in charge of supervising the work of Morton-Thiokol, the independent contractors out of Utah hiredto design the SRM. “The engineers at