• The Columbia disaster The Columbia disaster Somewhere amid the six-month debris field of grief and recrimination that has followed the crash of the space shuttle Columbia is an object lesson for all of America’s leaders: Listen harder. As NASA
• The Columbia disaster
The Columbia disaster
Somewhere amid the six-month debris field of grief and recrimination that has followed the crash of the space shuttle Columbia is an object lesson for all of America’s leaders: Listen harder.
As NASA awaits the final report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, considerable evidence has emerged to suggest that what happened to the shuttle 200,000 feet over Texas had as much to do with communications failure as hardware failure. Had NASA’s institutional culture been more open – had its managers listened harder and its employees had the courage to speak up – the seven Columbia astronauts might be alive today.
Joseph Grenny, a management consultant who has worked with the United Space Alliance – the joint venture among contractors who work for the space agency – says there is a phenomenon known as “NASA Chicken” at work. He told The New York Times that people who work for NASA are reluctant to raise any doubts about a project. A NASA engineer told the Times that the agency’s culture “does not accept being wrong.” Instead of a culture that says “there’s no such thing as a stupid question,” NASA fosters a culture where being wrong carries a high risk of humiliation.
At least twice during the 16-day flight of Columbia, “NASA Chicken” appears to have played a role. Once was when engineers for the Boeing Co. presented the results of a computer simulation of what might have happened when pieces of hardened foam tore away from the rocket booster and crashed into the orbiter’s heat-proof tiles.
Boeing presented a best-case scenario, though the actual data left plenty of room for doubt. No one who saw the presentation challenged the data, even though the simulation assumed the piece of foam that hit the orbiter was 640 times smaller than it actually was. Nor did the simulation include the possibility – as the accident review board now believes – that the foam tore a hole in the wing’s leading edge.
The second instance of “NASA Chicken” took place Jan. 22, six days into the flight, when Linda Ham, the head of the mission management team, convened a meeting of engineers in the Mission Evaluation Room. Ms. Ham told reporters July 22 that she had heard a vague report that some of the engineers wanted Air Force spy satellites to take photographs of the shuttle’s wings. But no one at the meeting spoke up, and she did little to encourage them. One of the engineers present in the room, Alan R. Rocha, had been pressing for the pictures. But he sat mute. “I was too low down here in the organization and she’s way up here,” he told ABC News.
Had the foam problem been taken seriously sooner, the accident might never have occurred. Had spy satellites confirmed there was a wing problem during the mission, a rescue could have been attempted. Instead, people kept their mouths shut and their fingers crossed.
No matter what kind of business you’re in, that’s lousy management policy. With most businesses, it just costs money and careers. With some companies and institutions – and here NASA is not the only government agency at fault – it costs human lives.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
