Echoes of Challenger
One board member, Dr. Sally Ride, served on both the CAIB panel and Rogers Commission and noted remarkable similarities between the two tragedies. She questioned why the shuttle was allowed to continue flying with known problems that were, eventually, catastrophic.
Since no machine is perfect, the problem comes down to identifying which known problems are an acceptable risk and which are not. In these two examples, shedding foam and failing o-rings, the organization failed to react correctly to the seriousness of the problem: in both cases, whereas engineers recognized the seriousness of the problem, NASA management dismissed both the evidence and the engineers' expertise and ultimately decided to continue with the mission, with catastrophic results.
To illustrate the organizational problems of safety awareness, Richard Feynman attached a personal appendix to the Rogers Commission Report. It is equally relevant to the CAIB report. In it, he wrote: "It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? … we could properly ask, 'What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?'"
The CAIB report found these same misperceptions by management and concluded that they contributed to the accident. Both reports also examined the ability of schedule pressures to influence safety-related design decisions.
Read more about this topic: Columbia Accident Investigation Board
Famous quotes containing the words echoes of and/or echoes:
“It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people?—or animals?—even forests or oceans or rocks?—in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)