This episode is a follow-on from our previous episode about the Apollo space program. Marcel and Todd talk about the failures surrounding the Challenger Disaster as a cautionary tail for today’s leaders to consider to avoid the same pitfalls.
Please listen to “The Challenger Disaster: You’re wrong about - The Challenger Disaster” - 3rd Jan 2019 by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes for full context: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-challenger-disaster/id1380008439?i=1000465289942
Please also listen to our previous podcast about the Apollo program as this is a follow-on discussion: https://burnupmedia.com/2020/04/13/ep23-learnings-from-the-space-industry-part-1of2-apollo-11/
The following topics are covered:
- The impact the challenger disaster had on NASA and our recollection of events
- The findings of the rogers commission
- Importance of listening to expertise
- Preventing a silo effect, where the procedures put in place box in taking logical action
- Designing for safety and understanding safe parameters, risk and probability
- The importance of communication unfiltered by middle managers
- Findings of the house of representatives committee report
- Dian Vaughn’s (sociologist) 1996 analysis of the disaster
- Government contracting and its role in the disaster
- High turnover at NASA and its role in the disaster
- A discussion about SpaceX and how they are approaching spaceship development is a more Agile way
We hope you enjoy this episode. As always please feel free to give us feedback and share.
Show Notes
The Challenger Disaster: You’re wrong about - The Challenger Disaster - 3rd Jan 2019 by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-challenger-disaster/id1380008439?i=1000465289942
Challenger Disaster footage with radio loop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hqOdAi_t2c
Radio communication transcript: https://history.nasa.gov/transcript.html
Rogers Commission report
https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/genindex.htm
https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/outreach/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_commission_report.pdf
Richard Feynman at commission hearing demonstrates the o-ring issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMmRKGkGD4
House of representatives report
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016.pdf
Controversial Edward Tuft diagram analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11520001_Representation_and_Misrepresentation_Tufte_and_the_Morton_Thiokol_Engineers_on_the_Challenger
Dian Vaughn’s (sociologist) 1996 analysis of all 200k documents (by then the incident is a full fledged field of research, most based only on the exec summaries)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Vaughan
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