Engineering Role before and after the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
Dr. Kulkarni will share events of the night before and the day of the 1986 Challenger launch, most likely not known publicly, as well as the environment that existed in the organization pre-Challenger and how it changed after the incident. He will discuss the steps which were taken to assure flight safety and some of the ethical challenges faced by him and his team.
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- West Virginia University
- Morgantown, West Virginia
- United States
- Building: Engineering Science Building (ESB)
- Room Number: G102
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- Co-sponsored by Ramana.Reddy@mail.wvu.edu
Speakers
Suresh B. Kulkarni
Biography:
Born in Hyderabad, India, he came the USA in 1967 to get a Ph.D in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Denver. After getting his degree in 1970, he returned to India, but could not find suitable employment. He returned to the USA and joined Thiokol Corporation (now Orbital-ATK) in Promontory, Utah in 1972 as an entry level junior engineer. He retired from there in 2003 as the Vice President of Systems Engineering over all of ATK’s strategic and tactical programs.
Appointed as the Vice President of Engineering in 1989 over 550 engineers to oversee the design, fabrication, testing and launch of the solid rocket motors, which propelled the shuttle into space, he had the ultimate authority to give the final “GO” for the ignition of the solid rocket boosters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. His efforts helped launch 55 space shuttle flights without a failure over a period of nine years, from 1989 to 1997.
Among the many astronauts he has worked with during his professional career were John W. Young who walked on the moon and Robert Crippen, the Mission Commander and Pilot respectively of STS-1 (Orbiter Columbia), the first orbital flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program, as well as Dr. Story Musgrave who repaired the Hubble Telescope twice.
Some notable Shuttle missions that Suresh was involved in include: Magellan Spacecraft to Venus (May 1989); Galileo Spacecraft to Jupiter (October 1989); Hubble Space Telescope (April 1990); and the Shuttle-Mir (the Russian Space Station) docking (July 1995). In 1999, he served on President Bill Clinton’s Presidential Commission known as the Space Launch Broad Area Review (BAR) to investigate commercial flight failures and recommend corrective actions.
Suresh and his wife, Diane, reside in Perry City, Utah and have two married daughters and two grandchildren. He spends his time doing volunteer work in the local community as well as gardening. He has received accolades as the “Citizen of the Year” in 2009 from the mayor of Perry City, and “Trustee of the Year” in 2010 from the Utah Hospital and Health Systems Association.