26 second video on why "Some guys just don't get it!"
https://vimeo.com/908281259
Our Secret for Success
https:/vimeo.com/895296359
Book Reports
1. The Miracle Equation by Hal Elrod
2. The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
3. The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly
4. Big Potential by Shawn Achor
5. Marijauna,Mental Illness and Violence by Alex Berenson
6. I Heard God Laugh by Matthew Kelly
7. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
8. Thomas Jefferson's fascinating story and Bible by Peter Manseau and 3 others
John presents the Happiness Advantage book to Rich DeVos before Rich speaks to the International Connection group.
Studies
1. To access John's view of the first 17 years of American history
click on the link below (16 page word document):
Jamestown 1607 - The First Four Heroes of American Liberty and Social Mobility.
2. The 4 Personality Types
To help understand yourself, and how you can better interact with others, take this simple test and learn this important information.
The Four Personality Types
Other Thoughts
0. “If we don’t want American exceptionalism and primacy, what is the alternative? What is the replacement that avoids the casket of history and self-determined demise? Ve gotta keep mooving.” John Borling, M Gen, USAF, The 2021 DODAL.
1. Time to fight on—Laws are different than regulations.
The reason you can’t retreat into private life and give up on politics—is that the cost of doing it is overwhelming. If you don’t live under good laws, life becomes truncated and less happy, injustice becomes customary, and civilization is compromised. And one cannot acquiesce in that. One has to be involved. And since politics is natural to us—man is essentially political, as Aristotle says—and since we do live in the greatest modern country—founded that way at least—we owe it a lot.
Lincoln’s argument was that either slavery is right or freedom is right, and that the country couldn’t long stand if it was divided on which was so. There was an argument that slavery should be allowed to spread and be protected as a good thing, and there was an argument that slavery violated America’s principles and should be kept from spreading.
There’s almost an exact parallel today, because the people who founded our country believed and wrote—and established a Constitution to provide—that there must never be unlimited rule by any man or group of men over other men. And our government is getting to a place where it threatens to become limitless.
Not only that, but government itself has become a strong force in elections: Much of the money funding the party of big government comes from inside the government through public employee unions—not to mention corporations, so many of which receive a form of welfare from the government. This new development represents a dangerous corruption of the election process—and elections are the only means left to Americans to limit government. It’s a real problem.
The experts who run our modern bureaucratic state think they are architects of a perfectly rational society. They think of themselves as scientists, and of the running of government as something more like science—the science of administration—than politics. They think they can coordinate society comprehensively so that no one is left out. That’s why they think of their work as something good and as something high. The problem is that what they are trying to do defies human nature—the human nature that led James Madison to write famously that men are not angels, and that led the Framers of the Constitution to divide government in order to limit government—and so what these experts are doing will ultimately lead to despotism.
There are many indications that there’s a deep and even intensifying opposition to bureaucratic government today. People don’t like it, and they don’t trust it. They want less of it. The 2012 election did not signify any change in that. Now, how to harness that opinion politically is the challenge. No one yet has been able to capitalize upon it.
People didn’t vote for, and don’t support, higher taxes and bigger government. But too few prominent conservatives are skillful at explaining the problem of the modern bureaucratic state. This form of government proceeds by rules, and rules upon rules, and compliance with those rules becomes a key activity of the entire nation. That results in bureaucracy, and in the inefficiencies of bureaucracy. Constitutional government, on the other hand, proceeds by clearly stated laws.
Not grasping this is an important failure of conservative statesmen today. We require laws in order to be productive and to live safely, but laws are different than regulations. Laws are passed by elected (and thus accountable) representatives, they cover everybody equally, and we can all participate in their enforcement because they are easy to understand. Not one of those three things is true of the regulations imposed by independent boards such as those established under Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. That distinction is at the heart of the choice Americans must make about how they will be governed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAn1FWInBi0
2. I foresee a 14 year effort
Senator Mike Lee in response to the 2014 SOTU (State of the Union), gave the best speech on January 28, 2014.
He sounds at times like David Stockman’s book when he talks about the crony privileged. He says Republicans can be just as much out of touch as Democrats. He calls ObamaCare an “Inequality Godzilla”. He wants to get rid of government subsidies for all businesses so that business profits are won from customers and not from government thru lobbyists. All this is Stockman talk. Stockman also believes we must make an omnibus amendment to our Constitution.
Senator Lee’s most interesting and unique point of view is how he parallels the recent Tea Party protests to the Boston Tea Party. Mike Lee says we succeeded as a country 240 years ago because of what we did after the Tea Party protest. It took 14 years to meet in Philadelphia and draft a Constitution. So he is saying today we can parallel our good history if we make a road from Protest to Reform. In my opinion, after watching the President’s talk last night, if we hurry we may be able to do it in 14 years, for our grandchildren.
Lee points out that 6 of the 10 wealthiest communities in our country are suburbs around Washington, DC. Northern Virginia is my hometown, it was a sleepy place when I grew up, but now it is out of control. The Conservative Reform Agenda thatSenator Lee describes is the beginning of a 14 year battle.
3 A. Thoughts After the 2012 Election
The number one threat to the liberty and social mobility of people throughout the world is government, and it usually ( but not always) is from their own government.
3B. Thoughts Before the 2024 Election
March 21, 2024 The interest rates on your credit cards, student loans, and even your mortgage are all up now because of the Treasury’s borrowing spree. It’s costing you thousands. EJ Antoni / @RealEJAntoni
April 2, 2024 The United States is almost certainly on an unsustainable path with regard to the astronomic rise in its national debt, according to a million simulations run by Bloomberg. By Megan Henney FOXBusiness.
June 21, 2024 After growing for decades, this year the U.S. debt will roughly match its GDP. Throughout history, nations that blithely piled up their obligations have eventually met unhappy ends. Gerald F. Seib
July 29, 2024 America’s Debt Hits $35 Trillion. David Ditch
A billboard displays the national debt at a bus stop in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 8, 2022. In the past two-and-a-half years alone, it has risen an additional $5 trillion. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images)
$35 trillion amounts to about $267,000 for every household in the country. During fiscal year 2023, ending Sept. 30, 2023, the federal government raked in more than $4.4 trillion in revenue—or more than $13,500 for every man, woman, and child in the country. That was more than enough to fund core governmental functions. However, unending bureaucratic bloat and out-of-control entitlement programs led to $6.1 trillion in spending—more than $18,000 per person.
Even if America avoids a recession or a major war, the deficit is on pace to approach $3 trillion per year by 2034. It wasn’t long ago that a $1 trillion deficit was worrisome.
In calendar year 2021, the most recent year for which there is complete data, the top 1% of households paid 46% of income taxes. In contrast, the bottom 95% of households paid a combined 31% of income taxes. The bottom 50% of households (making less than $48,700/year) earned 10% of the income and paid only 2% of all income taxes.
America’s federal tax system is far more progressive than most other developed nations. What separates the U.S. and Europe is the punishingly high taxes that European states impose on lower- and middle-class families. Rather than throwing more hard-earned money into the gaping maw of the federal behemoth, policymakers should focus on reducing spending.
The $35 trillion national debt is a grim milestone, but there’s still time to avoid the greatest bankruptcy in human history if the nation’s leaders are willing to stand up to special interests.
The “Please help my friend Sam” numbers shown below in item 7 need a major update on the debt item. Since those numbers were generated, our yearly payment to cover our runaway debt expansion has exploded from the $251 billion/year to todays about $1 trillion/year! Have we screwed ourselves?! Are we aware of what we have been doing!?
4. Human Equality and Individual Freedom
5. View of Abortion By Walker Percy June 8, 1981
Covington, La. -- I feel like saying something about this abortion issue. My credentials as an expert on the subject: none. I am an M.D. and a novelist. I will speak only as a novelist. If I give an opinion as an M.D., it wouldn't interest anybody since, for one thing, any number of doctors have given opinions and who cares about another.
The only obvious credential of a novelist has to do with his trade. He traffics in words and meanings. So the chronic misuse of words, especially the fobbing off of rhetoric for information, gets on his nerves. Another possible credential of a novelist peculiar to these times is that he is perhaps more sensitive to the atrocities of the age than most. People get desensitized. Who wants to go about his business being reminded of the six million dead in the holocaust, the 15 million in the Ukraine? Atrocities become banal. But a 20th century novelist should be a nag, an advertiser, a collector, a proclaimer of banal atrocities.
True legalized abortion--a million and a half fetuses flushed down the Disposal every year in this country--is yet another banal atrocity in a century where atrocities have become commonplace.
What I am writing this for is to call attention to a particularly egregious example of doublespeak that the abortionists--"pro-choicers," that is--seem to have hit on in the current rhetorical war.
As a novelist I can recognize meretricious use of language, disingenuousness , and a con job when I hear it.
The current con, perpetrated by some jurists, some editorial writers, and some doctors is that since there is no agreement about the beginning of human life, it is therefore a private religious or philosophical decision and therefore the state and the courts can do nothing about it. This is a con. I will not presume to speculate who is conning whom and for what purpose. But I do submit that religion, philosophy, and private opinion have nothing to do with this issue. I further submit that it is a commonplace of modern biology, known to every high school student and no doubt to you the reader as well, that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.
Such vexed subjects as the soul, God, and the nature of man are not at issue. What we are talking about and what nobody I know would deny is the clear continuum that exists in the life of every individual from the moment of fertilization of a single cell.
There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment.
Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is cross-examining a high school biology teacher and admonishing him that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human ovum is an individual human life. He is enjoined not to teach his private beliefs at a public school. Like Galileo he caves in, submits, but in turning away is heard to murmur, "But it's still alive!"
To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you're not going to have it both ways. You're going to be told what you're doing.
Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age."[1] His work displays a unique combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith.
6. Remember Katyn
Polish was spoken in my mother’s home as she grew up. I remember stepping outside the Polish Catholic church in Middletown, Connecticut after my grandmother’s funeral to speak with my 3 cousins in English. My mom never taught me Polish, she said I would never need it.
I am 50% Polish, and when I was 3 years old the events of Katyn happened. Polish director Andrzej Wajda produced KATYN, the 2007 Oscar-nominated drama based on the 1940 massacre of 21,768 Polish intelligentsia at the hands of Soviet troops. The Katyn forest is the site of the executions and mass-burials. The movie also covers the stories of the mothers, wives and children who survived their sons, husbands and fathers. How did they carry on in the face of such horror, especially when responsibility was publicly denied by the perpetrators and blamed on the Germans?! If a Polish citizen dared to speak of the known truth, the Soviet occupiers disposed of them as well.
It is ironic that all the military officers and professors were executed with a single shot through their brains - - for it was the quality of their brain that caused their death sentence.
Please don’t forget that this massacre happened. Realize the verbal as well as the physical assault on good people’s brains is continued today by evil people in governments throughout the world who work for more power and control.
John Clark Vaughan III
A side note about Poland and WWII. Pat and I stayed at the Ford Island Navy Lodge at Pearl Harbor for 3 nights on the way to our Maui IC Seminar. We walked to the battleship Missouri and learned a life full of lessons in just 2 hours in their little museum just behind the officer's quarters. This battleship was built after the surprise attack of Dec 7, 1941 that hit all 9 of our battleships - -but Missouri was the ship used for the signing of the Japanese surrender.
The museum had a fascinating chart showing the % of total population killed during WWII for various countries. The % was amazingly small for Germany, Japan, U.S. and U.K., but China, Russia, and Yugoslavia lost a considerable % of their population.
There was one enormous loser during World War II. Poland. Even Poland's 21,768 intellectuals singled out for their shot to the head at Katyn is a small number. Poland suffered with 17% of its total population being killed in WWII.
How many know this little discussed statistic? Not many. But you now know. Thanks for reading.
7. Please help my friend Sam
What would you advise?
My friend’s monthly spending is as follows:
The problem is, his total income from all sources is $2,142/month ($25,700/year)!
So he is going in the hole about $1,050/month. That means $12,600 more each year is going on his credit card debt and not being paid off.
If all goes right for Sam in the future, he still sees himself losing about $800/month. He has a younger cousin who he feels he could ask for a loan and maybe pay it back someday. What do you think Sam should do?
YOUR ADVICE: ________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Now that you have advised Sam - - -
Multiply Sam’s financial problem by 100 million - - that’s adding eight zeros to everything. It is like saying all 100 million households in the U.S. have the same problem that Sam has, and we do! This is the financial spending mess that our Federal Government has put us in.
Our politicians in Washington are planning to spend $3.83 trillion next year, but are “only” taxing us $2.57 trillion, thus raising our debt by $1.27 trillion next year alone! What do you advise that we do?
If you thought you had some difficulties balancing your household budget please realize your Federal Government will add $12,700 additional debt next year to all 100 million U. S. households - - that includes you!
Now, what do you advise that you do about it?!
May 2023 update: We have not done anything yet, except keep building our deadly debt -- $31.5 trillion now, with 50% of the congress voting to simply keep raising the debt limit. Last time our government had a surplus was 2001. We have to either raise taxes, raise the debt limit, or reduce spending.
8. PIGS lack discipline.
3/21/2010
I want to apologize in advance to my 7 grandchildren.
In round numbers, just the Medicare and Social Security $100 trillion of unfunded mandates, divided by 100 million U. S. households, is a debt load for my grandkids households of 1 million dollars each. They can’t declare bankruptcy to get rid of this inherited Federal debt.
President Bush II recently equaled FDRs Social Security debt load with his new Medicare prescription drug “benefit” (Part D), and today Obama has at least equaled Medicare debt with his Health Care change. The majority of my naïve college graduate friends still believe there is a Social Security Trust Fund someplace in a lock box. What a cruel hoax. And that’s only 17t of the 107t of unfunded mandates. So in 10 years it will be clearer that you can adjust each grandkid’s million dollar debt upwards further beyond reach by adding in this new big F. . . deal of National Health.
Roubini Global Economics projections show that in a matter of years, the U.S. gross federal debt will exceed GDP and the federal budget will never balance again. This is clearly unsustainable and raises questions about the future of the U.S. “AAA” ratings. We have bankrupt our country due to our ever-growing piggy lack of political will and lack of fiscal discipline. A people that value its privileges above its principles will soon lose both.
From my military advanced plans experience, we will soon start to lose our ability to defend ourselves around the world - - or even our homeland. The ever present foreign wolves and buzzards can now start circling with glee. We ended up being our own worst enemy.
This is a Federal problem, not State or local municipality problem. States cannot file for bankruptcy and are constitutionally required to balance their budgets; they will cut spending and/or raise taxes to close the budget gaps. Municipalities can file for bankruptcy and more will do so. Even our high deficit states: New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California have debt-to-GDP ratios below 15%; compared to the 60% of Europe’s PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). So we can’t blame our Federal bankruptcy on bad states like the Euro zone can now blame Greece & Portugal.
Power universally corrupts - - whether it is sports stars, Senators and Congressional representatives, Corporate board members, Presidents, movie stars, priests or pastors, Republicans or Democrats. Today’s Federal sins are what cause my grandchildren serious harm. The painful fiscal consequences have been pushed to them by a piggish electorate and an irresponsible media allowing their Federal Government to ruin their country - - and even act noble as they do it. I may live long enough to see the Greek riots come here.
I ask Emily, Graham, Ian, Sophia, Charlie, Johnny and Morgan for mercy and forgiveness. I did less than I could have to prevent this.
Some of my friends might wonder how a four decade positive thinker could write about a negative like this. After all, two of my 15 daily affirmations are: “I am in charge of happy thoughts. My heart is filled with love.” Well, I forgive those that have done this; they knew not what they were doing. I pray. I will now actively support the replacement of our present-day federal politicians with new, common sense people who must succeed in reducing this Federal government power and reckless spending. Every time they raise a tax they increase their power. And if all continues to fail, I can fall back on this. My recent escapee acquaintance from Cuba, who is now living in Virginia, tells me his parents in Cuba are happy people. They have no money, no car, and no internet, but they sing, laugh, eat and drink - - it’s just he and some of his other twenty year old friends that wanted more liberty and social mobility and were willing to risk their lives and switch countries to get it, even if it meant leaving their families behind. Life will go on, even if it is in a society with a sharply reduced standard of living that is tightly controlled by an all-powerful central government. I have traveled over this world from the Congo to Colombia to China as a military officer, a tourist, and as a business man. The main threat to the well-being of all the good people and families of this world is their own governments. My heirs will still sing, laugh, eat and drink, and unless we succeed, those will be their 4 last freedoms. Heck, PIGS can do that.
9. 7 years after his best seller book, Corruption of Capitalism, David Stockman warned on 23 March 2020 that the coronavirus is now exposing a far more deadly disease - - brought on by the FED and Washington politicians. From my point of view I agree with Stockman on our national debt. But he is in a better position than me to possibly do something about it.
As a right to lifer, it is amazing to see Washington in shock that 100,000 Americans might die from the virus, so they spend 2 to 6 trillion or more - - yet for decades 600,000 babies are aborted in the U.S. every year and the politicians remain silent and penniless.
As someone raised by depression-era parents; I relate more to frugality and have no need to buy everything in Walmart. Our country is moving towards 4% to 24% working at home, college taught by the best webinars, telemedicine apps that are more efficient and far less costly, etc. When the virus finally subsides, the country may go back - - but not all the way.
As an entrepreneur, one thing I certainly can do is talk to more people (they are now more willing to consider adding income streams) and simply enjoy building our virtual business.
ENJOY THE JOURNEY RATHER THAN FOCUS ON THE DESTINATION.
THE JOURNEY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE DESTINATION.
RELAX AND ENJOY THE WALK.
Christian countries have at the same time produced capitalists and great philanthropists. Take stock and see the hospitals, libraries, churches, schools, colleges, medical research centers, charitable foundations, international missions with hospitals and schools, and the like, that have been produced by Christian capitalism.
It is no sin to be a capitalist, but is a sin to be selfish. It is no sin to be wealthy, but is a sin to be greedy. It is no sin to work for a profit, but it is a sin to exploit the unfortunate.
It is our God-given responsibility to share, voluntarily, cheerfully, compassionately, with those who are in need. And in this sense our nation has always had a Christian conscience.
We should not be putting our future generations into an impossible debt situation to solve our today's problems.
10. All that wealth and power flowed to a sleepy place
Reference:
It is so hard for me to imagine what has happened to the area I grew up in from kindergarten through high school.
The northern Virginia suburbs and D.C. itself were a quiet, conservative place from 1941 to 1955.
I lived in a small, 2-bedroom apartment with one small bathroom until 6th grade. Hard to imagine that my dad was a full Colonel in Army Air Corps and the apartment next to us was Karl & Francis Baumann (Karl covered White House for Associated Press), and nearby apartment were friends Joe and Sue Hearst (Joe covered White House for Chicago Tribune). Not fancy digs for people with important jobs – there just were not fancy places to live anyplace! Imagine new houses today need 3 car garages, and when I grew up nobody had even a one car garage!
Then off to Claremont housing development (still in Arlington County), where my folks bought a house! Still 1 bathroom and certainly no garage but had a leaky basement and 2 bedrooms upstairs with horrible insulation. Homes were not air conditioned. In 7th grade I got my first bike!! (kids in apartments didn’t have bikes, where would you keep a bike?). In 8th grade (1951) my friend and I took a bicycle trip where we went to the southern end of “Shirley Highway” (now I-395). This brand-new highway was about to extend out into Fairfax County, where it ended at Route 236.
I guess if you win World War 11 things start growing massively around your capital. Money started flowing in and at Thanksgiving of 10th grade my folks bought a “dream house” on Overlook Drive in the Pinecrest community in Fairfax County near Annandale. Still not air conditioned and no garage or basement and no upstairs; but 2 (two!) bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, a vaulted ceiling, and a big yard! Ten miles to Fairfax High School on a bus, where kids were mostly country except a small enclave called McLean, where kids came from homes where someone went to college (like Arlington).
Took quite a while for me to adjust and find friends. Befriended a neighbor Jim Gaines (one year younger, went to Annandale High), plus good friend Bill Hathaway who lived in first house outside Auchincloss estate entrance in McLean (Jackie Onassis and Senator JFK), and finally Scott Lovelace, whose parents then also moved from Claremont out to go to Fairfax High. Bill did chores for the estate, so I got to meet Jackie and JFK. Bill and I even laid out their wedding gifts to display on tables around the indoor paddle tennis court.
Through high school and even when coming home from Va Tech, going downtown DC was still an easy trip to a relatively quiet place. No big traffic jams, no interstates, and I seriously doubt if any of the counties around DC would have made the top 10 wealthiest and the most left wing in country – heck, government employees didn’t get paid much back then. But the defense industry and lobbyists were growing stronger every year, and politicians had many more opportunities to make money on the side.
Bottom line, winning World War 11 dramatically changed the culture, power, and economics of the sleepy area I grew up in. Did it change it for the better? Maybe only time will tell. I don’t feel I am in a position to tell. Need a higher elevation (and a crystal ball) to be able to get a clearer picture.
11. A Soldier's Spirit Guide. Son John IV wrote this to his friend Ani from America Somoa, after his tour in Iraq where Ani lost his team of 10 and was injured himself from the IED. John was advising Ani how he could use the experience for a positive.
“I see their faces when I close my eyes”
“Last night I was there again, fought my way to safety, and awoke on my lawn.”
“My wife’s from Jersey she tries to understand, but can’t”
“The docs say it will be ok”
“What do they know?”
------
“Speak to them. How many were there?”
“10, I feel the guilt”
“Give them the respect they deserve, not your pity. Talk to your ancestors; bring your warriors to you. Give them jobs to do in your life. Mourn them all, but trust their choices.
Now you must live one life for 10, and they will help you, but you must call them by name and give them work.”
The spirit guide told the stories of old, of how his life was torn and tragic. Relentless, merciful, brave and sorrowful, but his ancestors worked.
“‘You must now be the guardian angel for my family. I am tying you to this earth, to live your life in full through me, and protecting mine as if it was yours.”
The Soldier’s tear was alone on his cheek.
12. The CHALLENGER Accident and later Space Shuttles.
I was at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Lab in 1967 and was preparing to go to Purdue University for my PhD at their Jet Propulsion Center. It was a great 3 years at Edwards AFB, even enjoyed playing horseshoes with my backyard neighbor and future astronaut Charlie Duke, who was at AF Test Pilot School then with George Thompson, Don Henderson, Darius Gaskins, etc. Duke would later become the 10th person to walk on the moon and the youngest at age 36.
27Jan1967 was the first of 3 spacecraft accidents that would take the lives of 17 US Astronauts. Two of the 3 astronauts killed that day in a ground test of the Project Mercury Apollo Saturn capsule were Purdue Engineering graduates Virgill (Gus) Grissom, Mechanical Engr 1950 (and later AFIT Grad too) and Roger Chafee Aero Engr 1957. They later named the building where I had my office, Chafee Hall; and another building on campus Grissom Hall.. My PhD research at Purdue was funded by Thiokol Chemical, Huntsville, AL
The Challenger Space Shuttle blew up 73 seconds into the flight on 28Jan1986. It was the 25th Space Shuttle mission and the 10th mission of a Challenger orbiter. It was 19 years after the loss of Grissom and Chafee. All 7 flight crew were killed, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe and astronaut Ronald McNair – who was mentored at NC A&T by our Purdue neighbor, PhD Tom Sandin. Tom had the entire school all watching the launch (and destruction) on TV network in the school’s auditorium.
The right hand solid rocket motor (SRM) made by Thiokol never failed, burning the planned 120 seconds as designed, but was the cause of the accident. The sequence of events is described below.
It starts with ice everywhere and no wind. Freezing rain hit the Cape leading to several launch aborts on previous days. The o-ring erosion noted in posttest inspections of the joints of the segmented boosters had been a growing concern of Thiokol engineers, including Al McDonald, head of the booster design team, although all previous flights were without incident. A launch at freezing temperatures in Florida had never been expected. The Thiokol engineers had recommended another launch delay but were overruled by NASA (Huntsville) and Thiokol management (who were anxiously awaiting Marshall to sign a new and larger production contract).
Thiokol engineers feared that low temperatures might increase risk of 0-ring failure but nobody really knew and NASA (Marshall) did not want to lose another million dollars a day for a delayed launch and did not want to disappoint President Reagan who intended to talk to the school teacher in the shuttle while in orbit (first civilian on a shuttle flight) during his State of the Union speech to Congress.
So what about the wind? The huge liquid propellant tanks (cryogenic H2 and O2) were filled just prior to launch and would “boil off” vapors while waiting for the launch to take place. With any wind over 5 miles an hour, the vapors would drift off away from the shuttle assembly. That day, no wind. The vapors simply fell down and encountered the right hand booster motor aft segment joint and drifted into the pit. While temperatures at the motors were 28 to 31 degrees, the ice removal crew noted readings as low as 9 and 12 degrees on the right hand booster (no one was told).
The booster segment joints were the tang-clevis joint configuration similar to the joints in the Titan booster used for years by the Air Force. Two O-rings are used to seal the joints and 177 nickel pins are used to connect the four segments, held in place with a steel band. Initially, everyone believed such a joint closed as the motors pressurized. However, the erosion and soot found in the joints after disassembly showed the joints initially opened upon the ignition pressurization (0 to 0.6 seconds) and did not close as the motors reached the 920 psi operating pressure. On ignition, hot gas and soot would sometimes sneak past the first o-ring causing some erosion but would be sealed by the redundant second o-ring. The o-rings were fluorocarbon rubber which works well at normal temperatures but does stiffen up when cold. There is grease in the o-ring area which also becomes sluggish with cold temperatures.
Upon launch, some smoke was seen exiting the aft field joint for 0.68 to 2.5 seconds. This is after motor is at pressure. Cold o-rings? Ice in the joint? Don't know. However, it stops after 2.5 seconds and the motor pressure remains normal suggesting no gas leak. Everything normal as the shuttle approaches maximum dynamic pressure at 59 seconds, Mach 2 and 50,000 feet. (The shuttle liquid engines are held to 90% thrust to minimize the dynamic pressure buildup and are then throttled up to 100% for the rest of the flight.)
The films show a gas jet (6000 degrees) starting at 59 seconds coming from the aft field joint and impinging on the propellant tank and the aft end strut holding the SRM in place. (The liquid propellant flows by pumping, not pressure, so the propellant tank is huge but relatively light made of aluminum.) The jet burned a hole in the hydrogen tank and gases began to exhaust behind the shuttle. When the jet cuts the aft strut, the motor base swings away and the head rotates into the upper propellant tank where oxygen begins to escape. When the H2 and 02 meet, we have KA-BOOM at 73 seconds. At 73 seconds, after leaking for 14 seconds, the right hand booster is only 20 psi lower than expected, showing the leak was not huge but it certainly was effective.
The redesigned joint, with “help” from everybody since it was a program of strategic national importance, was well done and verified in ground tests where the loads expected during maximum dynamic pressure were applied during the firing for the first time ever in the rocket industry.
The COLUMBIA was the next shuttle disaster on Feb 1, 2003 – 17 years after the Challenger accident. It was the 113th Shuttle mission and the 28th Columbia orbiter mission. We all got to watch the shuttle come apart during reentry with loss of the crew of 7, again including 2 women. The debris field over Texas was extensive and heart-breaking in recovery. The failure analysis for that disaster seems so sad.
The effort for a national space program eventually collapsed. NASA finally elected to rely on Russian hardware for cheaper space launches (and we know how that worked out) and space efforts are now done by private companies.
One of those private companies now working in space is Sierra Nevada Corporation, owned by ex-IBOs in my group, Eren and Fatih Ozmen, from Langley AFB, who are preparing their Dream Chaser spacecraft for flight in 2024. Forbes magazine rates the Ozmens as worth $6.7 b; from successfully doing much great work in many areas for our national defense.
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