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The Challenger Launch Decision

Author: Diane Vaughan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226851761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
List of Figures and TablesPreface1: The Eve of the Launch 2: Learning Culture, Revising History 3: Risk, Work Group Culture, and the Normalization of Deviance 4: The Normalization of Deviance, 1981-1984 5: The Normalization of Deviance, 1985 6: The Culture of Production 7: Structural Secrecy 8: The Eve of the Launch Revisited 9: Conformity and Tragedy 10: Lessons Learned Appendix A. Cost/Safety Trade-Offs? Scrapping the Escape Rockets and the SRB Contract Award Decision Appendix B. Supporting Charts and Documents Appendix C. On Theory Elaboration, Organizations, and Historical EthnographyAcknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings

Author: Allan J. McDonald
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813047013
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1075

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Book Description
On a cold January morning in 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, despite warnings against doing so by many individuals, including Allan McDonald. The fiery destruction of Challenger on live television moments after launch remains an indelible image in the nation’s collective memory. In Truth, Lies, and O-Rings, McDonald, a skilled engineer and executive, relives the tragedy from where he stood at Launch Control Center. As he fought to draw attention to the real reasons behind the disaster, he was the only one targeted for retribution by both NASA and his employer, Morton Thiokol, Inc., makers of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. In this whistle-blowing yet rigorous and fair-minded book, McDonald, with the assistance of internationally distinguished aerospace historian James R. Hansen, addresses all of the factors that led to the accident, some of which were never included in NASA's Failure Team report submitted to the Presidential Commission. Truth, Lies, and O-Rings is the first look at the Challenger tragedy and its aftermath from someone who was on the inside, recognized the potential disaster, and tried to prevent it. It also addresses the early warnings of very severe debris issues from the first two post-Challenger flights, which ultimately resulted in the loss of Columbia some fifteen years later.

Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

Author: DIANE Publishing Company
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788119125
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description

Bringing Columbia Home

Author: Michael D. Leinbach
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628728523
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Voted the Best Space Book of 2018 by the Space Hipsters The dramatic inside story of the epic search and recovery operation after the Columbia space shuttle disaster. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation’s eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts: Parallel Confusion Courage, Compassion, and Commitment Picking Up the Pieces A Bittersweet Victory For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible. Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.

Dead Reckoning

Author: Diane Vaughan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679654X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
Vaughan unveils the complicated and high-pressure world of air traffic controllers as they navigate technology and political and public climates, and shows how they keep the skies so safe. When two airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Americans watched in uncomprehending shock as first responders struggled to react to the situation on the ground. Congruently, another remarkable and heroic feat was taking place in the air: more than six hundred and fifty air traffic control facilities across the country coordinated their efforts to ground four thousand flights in just two hours—an achievement all the more impressive considering the unprecedented nature of the task. In Dead Reckoning, Diane Vaughan explores the complex work of air traffic controllers, work that is built upon a close relationship between human organizational systems and technology and is remarkably safe given the high level of risk. Vaughan observed the distinct skill sets of air traffic controllers and the ways their workplaces changed to adapt to technological developments and public and political pressures. She chronicles the ways these forces affected their jobs, from their relationships with one another and the layouts of their workspace to their understanding of their job and its place in society. The result is a nuanced and engaging look at an essential role that demands great coordination, collaboration, and focus—a role that technology will likely never be able to replace. Even as the book conveys warnings about complex systems and the liabilities of technological and organizational innovation, it shows the kinds of problem-solving solutions that evolved over time and the importance of people.

Challenger Revealed

Author: Richard C. Cook
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
The Reagan Administration pushed hard for NASA to launch shuttle mission 51L, before it was ready. 73 seconds into the launch, the shuttle exploded, killing seven and leaving a nation traumatized. Richard Cook, lead resource analyst at NASA for the Solid Rocket Boosters, was the first to warn of possible catastrophic failure. His memo, detailing astronaut concerns and warnings from the shuttle builders at Morton Thiokol, was ignored by top NASA officials and members of the Reagan administration. In the aftermath, NASA launched an investigation to "discover" the cause of the disaster. Though within NASA there was absolute certainty about the O-ring failure, they began a cover-up by publicly proclaiming that the cause was unknown. A Reagan administration Commission perpetrated the same lie. When Cook realized that the Commission was not interested in the truth, he leaked the original documents to the New York Times, setting off a cascade of disclosures, including revelations by Morton Thiokol engineers that they had tried to stop the launch.--From publisher description.

The Burning Blue

Author: Kevin Cook
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250755565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The untold story of a national trauma—NASA’s Challenger explosion—and what really happened to America’s Teacher in Space, illuminating the tragic cost of humanity setting its sight on the stars You’ve seen the pictures. You know what happened. Or do you? On January 28, 1986, NASA’s space shuttle Challenger exploded after blasting off from Cape Canaveral. Christa McAuliffe, America’s “Teacher in Space,” was instantly killed, along with the other six members of the mission. At least that's what most of us remember. Kevin Cook tells us what really happened on that ill-fated, unforgettable day. He traces the pressures—leading from NASA to the White House—that triggered the fatal order to launch on an ice-cold Florida morning. Cook takes readers inside the shuttle for the agonizing minutes after the explosion, which the astronauts did indeed survive. He uncovers the errors and corner-cutting that led an overconfident space agency to launch a crew that had no chance to escape. But this is more than a corrective to a now-dimming memory. Centering on McAuliffe, a charmingly down-to-earth civilian on the cusp of history, The Burning Blue animates a colorful cast of characters: a pair of red-hot flyers at the shuttle's controls, the second female and first Jewish astronaut, the second Black astronaut, and the first Asian American and Buddhist in space. Drawing vivid portraits of Christa and the astronauts, Cook makes readers forget the fate they're hurtling toward. With drama, immediacy, and shocking surprises, he reveals the human price the Challenger crew and America paid for politics, capital-P Progress, and the national dream of "reaching for the stars."

Disastrous High-Tech Decision Making

Author: Frederick F. Lighthall
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1457532972
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Disastrous High-Tech Decision Making: From Disasters to Safety offers new insights for scholars studying management, decision making, cognition in the wild, and safety in the context of imperatives to continue operations. This book takes you inside the deliberations and action that have produced high-tech disasters in safetycritical enterprises. From primary data and analyses never before considered in scholarly assessments of the Challenger disaster, Frederick F. Lighthall, Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago, applies the insights of macroergonomics, social psychology, naturalistic decision making, and legal argumentation to this expanded set of documents and data. He argues that the Challenger case represents a prototype of decision making that arises whenever a possibly threatening change in operating conditions becomes evident. In this situation, inevitable in boundarypushing enterprises, four generic decision-making pitfalls await engineers and managers who must decide whether continuing to operate is safe or dangerous. These four decision-making vulnerabilities are also evident, Lighthall argues, in the decision situations of other high-tech disasters both similar (the Columbia shuttle) and dissimilar (Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster). In Part I of the book Lighthall traces decision participants’ chart-by-chart deliberations and argument about whether proceeding with the Challenger’s launch would be dangerous. Part II analyzes from contrasting perspectives the dynamics revealed in the narrative. Lighthall’s analysis ends by examining the demanding changes in outlook, knowledge disciplines, and learning processes required for safety to compete with the production imperatives of high-tech enterprises operating in unforgiving environments. This book is a must read both for students of management and of engineering who may find themselves working in these high-tech settings, and for managers and engineers who now work in these settings.

Comm Check...

Author: Michael Cabbage
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743266986
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
On February 1, 2003, the unthinkable happened. The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated 37 miles above Texas, seven brave astronauts were killed and America's space program, always an eyeblink from disaster, suffered its second catastrophic in-flight failure. Unlike the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier, Columbia's destruction left the nation one failure away from the potential abandonment of human space exploration. Media coverage in the immediate aftermath focused on the possible cause of the disaster, and on the nation's grief. But the full human story, and the shocking details of NASA's crucial mistakes, have never been told -- until now. Based on dozens of exclusive interviews, never-before-published documents and recordings of key meetings obtained by the authors, Comm Check takes the reader inside the conference rooms and offices where NASA's best and brightest managed the nation's multi-billion-dollar shuttle program -- and where they failed to recognize the signs of an impending disaster. It is the story of a space program pushed to the brink of failure by relentless political pressure, shrinking budgets and flawed decision making. The independent investigation into the disaster uncovered why Columbia broke apart in the sky above Texas. Comm Check brings that story to life with the human drama behind the tragedy. Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, two of America's most respected space journalists, are veterans of all but a handful of NASA's 113 shuttle missions. Tapping a network of sources and bringing a combined three decades of experience to bear, the authors provide a rare glimpse into NASA's inner circles, chronicling the agency's most devastating failure and the challenges that face NASA as it struggles to return America to space.

Challenger

Author: Malcolm McConnell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780671654399
Category : Space shuttles
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description