Challenger Explosion

 

In the Human Side of Technology, one of my January session classes, Ralph Katz discussed the challenger incident. Last week was the 25th anniversary of the accident. It was really interesting to see an inside perspective on how the events occurred. We only saw part of the story of course (we never get the full story), the best part was when the Morton Thiokol senior VP tells Bob Lund (VP of engineering) to take off his engineers hat and put on his management hat….ouch. The decision of giving NASA the OK to launch in such cold weather knowing there could be an issue with the O-rings led to one of the most well known Shuttle explosions in history. Also this story illustrates how sometimes the technical knowledge is not always the most relevant, knowing how to communicate and making sound decisions by taking into consideration the human factor is critical.

You can checkout the story here: http://history.nasa.gov/sts51l.html

And some videos: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/movies/movies.html