Diane Vaughn, in the introduction to her book "The Challenger Disaster" warns readers not to take the conclusion that people most frequently take, which is that it was all about the O-Rings -- the book is about the operational system that was used to fly the shuttle successfully 133 times out of 135.
"Normalization of Deviance" at NASA was a top-down system that, flight by flight, approved variances for hundreds of "unacceptable" risks with the space shuttle. It was not a scandal that they had meetings about risks that could cause "catastrophe" -- if a risk wasn't catastrophic they wouldn't talk about it at those meetings, they just didn't have time.
Today is it fashionable to say it is "normalization of deviance" because some doctor doesn't wash his hands after taking a crap or because the captain of a plane tries to take off even when there is another plane on the runway, but these are almost all "bottom up" violations of procedures, not the other way around.
The two shuttle disasters were decided upon in 1976 when the Shuttle was designed with numerous deadly flaws. Every other manned spacecraft spent a good chunk of the the budget and at least one nail biting test on a crew escape system.
Had the designers not "normalized deviance" and done things the way every other manned spacecraft did, the Challenger astronauts might have been picked up with a helicopter and been drinking coffee with sailors an hour later -- the astronauts were not killed by the explosion, but rather by the impact with the ocean.
They didn't do "the right thing" early on because the weight of a crew escape system would have eaten into the payload capacity, one sign that the mixed mission of the space shuttle was a mistake.
If you look at Starship and other modern vehicles frequently you see wings that look vestigial, like the "bat wings" that somebody might draw on the head or lower back of an anime character.
At hypersonic speed you can use "fins" for wings, and the shuttle would have been much safer for it if they hadn't had the crazy idea that they wanted to launch from Vandenberg, overfly Moscow, then go crossrange 1000 miles to land at Edwards.
The shuttle never flew from Vandenberg but it sure carried around too-large wings that were vulnerable and killed a crew.
If one thing shocked me about "The Challenger Disaster" it was despite 100,000's of pages of documentation they never set a minimum temperature for a shuttle takeoff -- although it seems every other technological artifact has a published operating temperature range.
"Normalization of Deviance" at NASA was a top-down system that, flight by flight, approved variances for hundreds of "unacceptable" risks with the space shuttle. It was not a scandal that they had meetings about risks that could cause "catastrophe" -- if a risk wasn't catastrophic they wouldn't talk about it at those meetings, they just didn't have time.
Today is it fashionable to say it is "normalization of deviance" because some doctor doesn't wash his hands after taking a crap or because the captain of a plane tries to take off even when there is another plane on the runway, but these are almost all "bottom up" violations of procedures, not the other way around.
The two shuttle disasters were decided upon in 1976 when the Shuttle was designed with numerous deadly flaws. Every other manned spacecraft spent a good chunk of the the budget and at least one nail biting test on a crew escape system.
Had the designers not "normalized deviance" and done things the way every other manned spacecraft did, the Challenger astronauts might have been picked up with a helicopter and been drinking coffee with sailors an hour later -- the astronauts were not killed by the explosion, but rather by the impact with the ocean.
They didn't do "the right thing" early on because the weight of a crew escape system would have eaten into the payload capacity, one sign that the mixed mission of the space shuttle was a mistake.
If you look at Starship and other modern vehicles frequently you see wings that look vestigial, like the "bat wings" that somebody might draw on the head or lower back of an anime character.
At hypersonic speed you can use "fins" for wings, and the shuttle would have been much safer for it if they hadn't had the crazy idea that they wanted to launch from Vandenberg, overfly Moscow, then go crossrange 1000 miles to land at Edwards.
The shuttle never flew from Vandenberg but it sure carried around too-large wings that were vulnerable and killed a crew.
If one thing shocked me about "The Challenger Disaster" it was despite 100,000's of pages of documentation they never set a minimum temperature for a shuttle takeoff -- although it seems every other technological artifact has a published operating temperature range.