Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook (born October 20, 1946) is a former U.S. federal government analyst, who was instrumental in exposing White House cover-ups regarding the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. As a witness to the incident and a participant in the subsequent investigations, Cook provided key documents to The New York Times and testified before the Rogers Commission. In 1990, he received the Cavallo Foundation Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government for his testimony. In 2007, his memoirs of the tragedy were published in Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.
As a policy analyst for the U.S. Government from 1970 until 1986, Cook's career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the White House Consumer Office, and NASA. From 1986 until 2007, Cook served as a Project Manager for the U.S. Treasury Department,
Now retired from 32-years of government service, Cook works as a writer and private consultant with particular focus on monetary reform. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have been published in numerous magazines, newspapers and websites, and have been translated into several languages. A spokesman for economic democracy, Cook's book, We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform was published in 2009. He is also author of In the Footsteps of the Yogi: The 1999 U.S. Tour of Sri Sri Sri Shivabalayogi Maharaj, and was recently named the U.S. director for White Light Books, a company based in Australia that focuses on the merging of public affairs with world spiritual currents.
Challenger
As a Resource Analyst at NASA's Comptroller's Office, Cook was responsible for assessing the budgetary implications of the , External Tank, and Centaur Upper Stage of the Space Shuttle program. In July 1985, Cook performed background research on the SRBs to determine whether any engineering questions would require additional funding that should be included in NASA's next budget. After consulting with engineers in the Office of Space Flight in Washington, D.C., Cook wrote a memo to Michael Mann which summarized some problems with the SRB O-rings:
:"There is little question, however, that flight safety has been and is still being compromised by potential failure of the seals, and it is acknowledged that failure during launch would certainly be catastrophic. There is also indication that staff personnel knew of this problem sometime in advance of management's becoming apprised of what was going on." The resulting news article
Cook received the Cavallo Foundation's Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government for helping to uncover the facts about the faulty O-ring seals that led the shuttle's solid rocket boosters to fail.
Monetary reform
As a former U.S. Treasury Department analyst, Cook has authored We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform proposing a series of measures to transform the dominance of a debt-based monetary system into one aligned more closely with the physical economy's productive values.
Published works
* Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006)
* We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform (Tendril Press, 2008-2009)
* In the Footsteps of the Yogi: The 1999 U.S. Tour of Sri Sri Sri Shivabalayogi Maharaj, (Authorhouse 2001)

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