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.
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of The Space Shuttle Program
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, issues and/or problems:
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
—Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948)