Criticism of The Space Shuttle Program - Cultural Issues and Problems

Cultural Issues and Problems

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

— Richard Feynmann, Rogers Commission Report, on the Challenger disaster.

Some researchers have criticized a pervasive shift in NASA culture away from safety in order to ensure that launches took place in a timely fashion. Allegedly, NASA upper-level management embraced this decreased safety focus in the 1980s while some engineers remained wary. According to Vaughan, the aggressive launch schedules arose in the Reagan years as a way to rehabilitate America's post-Vietnam prestige.

The physicist Richard Feynman, who was appointed to the official inquiry on the Challenger disaster, estimated the risk to be "on the order of a percent" in his report, adding, "Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.

Despite Feynman's warnings, and despite the fact that Vaughan served on safety boards and committees at NASA, the subsequent press coverage has found some evidence that NASA's relative disregard for safety might persist to this day. For example, NASA discounted the risk from small foam chunk breakage at launch and assumed that the lack of damage from prior foam collisions suggested the future risk was low.