Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Kenneth Hess talks about the lessons from the Columbia investigation. After showing some startling video — an animation of the failure and video of the pieces streaming to earth — he says that the investigation concluded the problem ultimately was with NASA's culture. NASA got over-confident. Corporate politics had set in. They looked to prove flights were unsafe, not that they were safe. There was overt and subtle time pressure. These factors caused them to ignore the indications that there was a problem with the foam.

Posted by D. Weinberger at March 22, 2004 11:51 AM