Steve Heninger has chosen to represent Judson A. “Jud” Lovingood in a defamation suit against Discovery Communications. Mr. Lovingood is a retired NASA manager who believes he was falsely portrayed in a television movie about the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Our client was deputy manager of the Shuttle Projects Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville at the time of the disaster. The Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 28, 1986, and an investigation found the cause to be a fiery leak in a solid rocket booster under Marshall’s management that caused the main fuel tank to explode.
A critical scene in the movie involving the accident investigation attributes quotes and positions to Mr. Lovingood that are incorrect and not in the official record.
At issue is testimony before the Challenger investigation commission by characters identified as Feynman and Lovingood. The suit says that in the movie’s crucial scene Lovingood is shown testifying falsely that the odds of a shuttle failure were much higher than other NASA engineers calculated.
Read more about the case here.
