[gmiller123456]

Kinda pointless to show the slide without the audio of the presenter to go with it. Unless we're thinking the presenter just read the slide verbatim with no extra context, and no questions were asked, which would essentially defeat the purpose of having a presenter and audience present at the same time. I know I've seen presenters actually do that, but the author didn't provide any indication that that's what happened here.

[mannykannot]

Indeed, and the article leaves out other relevant issues, such as where else the question was discussed, and also when - the article rather glibly suggests a rescue mission could have been launched, but that would have been a very risky action in its own right, even if it had been started on the day of the launch; it remains uncertain whether Columbia's oxygen could have been stretched out long enough even then. There were no other alternatives.

This led to a certain realistic fatalism:

"Then [Linda Ham] delivered the sentence that would define the rest of the tragedy; a sentence that was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager that I talked to over the next two weeks: ‘You know, if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.’ As unsettling as that was, I had to agree; going back to the first shuttle flight it had been well known that there was no way to repair the heat shield in flight. Nobody, not even me, thought about a rescue mission. Why would we?" - Wayne Hale, https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/after-ten-years-d...

Once it became clear, during the investigation, that the foam impact had created a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge of the wing, the board's chairman, Admiral Hal Gehman, insisted that a test should be performed to demonstrate that this was likely. As this meant destroying one of the few spare parts, and it had not been decided at this point to retire the shuttles, he was unsure whether this was worth doing, but what convinced him to go ahead was the number of engineers and managers who still doubted this could have happened, despite all the evidence.

It is never just one thing.

The whole of Wayne Hale's retrospective starts here: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/after-ten-years-w...

[vmception]

> It is never just one thing.

Especially when Boeing is involved

[whartung]

Well, that's kind of the point.

The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last.

But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not.

As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record.

I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening.

Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.

[thrwy_918]

> Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion.

This isn't an appropriate comparison. The purpose of the conclusion is to present the findings of the paper, whereas the purpose of presentation slides is not (or at least, should not be) to summarize the content of the presentation.

[300bps]

The audio of the presenter would add additional context but the PowerPoint presentation is objectively bad.

It’s a wall of text. It should have had a single sentence in bold giant font:

WE HAVE NEVER TESTED AN INSULATION COLLISION AT ANYTHING CLOSE TO THIS LEVEL

[vmception]

Thats my conclusion too, the article says there are too many words, and then says there are too little words

"SOFI and ramp mean the same thing, whats the reader to dooooo"

"Significant is used 5 times... without explanation!"

"There are 100 words!"

Yes, we need to know how the presentation went, and we also. need to know what NASA would have alternatively done and if it was honestly considered at all or even feasible

On a side note, its crazy that a couple tiles compromise the entire vessel, but I understand that the heat would travel across the inner metal. Its still crazy to think there isn't some other kind of dissipation measure possible.

[grenbys]

I think blaming the slide/presentation is severely affected by the hindsight bias - of course, knowing the outcomes, we can find loads of issues with the slide. More importantly, it is always easy to declare a "human factor" incident and blame the human for "bad slides". But the very fact that such an important decision (re-entry) was (presumably) made as a result of Boeing engineers presenting to NASA officials/managers is eyebrow raising. The fact that this type of an issue (foam hitting the tiles) was well know in advance and yet not properly addressed indicates a systemic organizational problems. It would be great to study those organizational factors and processes that resulted in both tragedies: how the risk was managed? how NASA "drifted" into failure? I believe focusing on a slide completely misses the point.