Will we explode?

It happened, she said, because of the “normalization of deviance.”

I was listening to 39-year veteran aerospace engineer talk about why the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after take-off on January 28, 1986, killing all 7 astronauts aboard.

The simple explanation was the failure of O-rings on one of the rocket boosters. But why did they fail? Because of the “normalization of deviance.” I’ll explain, as she did. But bear with me because this is, in fact, rocket science.

The O-rings (made of rubber-like material) were designed to prevent hot, high-pressure gases from escaping through the joints between the booster segments during rocket combustion. But shortly after liftoff, the seals were breached, and hot, pressurized gas from within the solid rocket booster leaked through the joint and burned through the aft attachment strut connecting it to the external propellant tank, then into the tank itself. 

Still with me?

The O-rings failed because they had shrunk, stiffened, and become less flexible in the cold weather. The temperature at launch time at Cape Canaveral was 36 degrees. The night before the temperature had dropped to 18 degrees.

The engineers who created the rocket booster system had never tested the O-rings below 53 degrees. But after several previous launches where blow-by gases appeared and nothing catastrophic happened, confidence grew. And the acceptable temperature gradually lowered, not because of new evidence of safety, but because no disaster had happened—yet.

And so, the fatal explosion occurred because deviations from expected or safe behavior (the acceptable temperature for take-off) became normalized over time—not because the risk went away, but because the negative outcome didn't happen immediately.

Are you seeing a parallel situation here?

Consider the state of U.S. politics at the moment. Consider what attitudes, ideas, language, and action has been normalized. Consider the extraordinary shift in the Overton Window of discourse, which is the range of subjects and arguments political acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.

Remember, if you will, the norm from which we have deviated. It was not without its many and serious flaws. But it had an air of sanity about it, a consistency, a smidgen of charity, a glimpse of open-heartedness, a (perhaps shallow) breath of acceptance.

We have deviated so very far from this.

If this deviance persists, we will explode.