Nasa Launch Quotes

It looked like Mission Control, if NASA's business was launching rockets full of rapping multiracial actors in colonial garb into space.

While play-acting grim scenarios day in and day out may sound like a good recipe for clinical depression, it’s actually weirdly uplifting. Rehearsing for catastrophe has made me positive that I have the problem-solving skills to deal with tough situations and come out the other side smiling. For me, this has greatly reduced the mental and emotional clutter that unchecked worrying produces, those random thoughts that hijack your brain at three o’clock in the morning. While I very much hoped not to die in space, I didn’t live in fear of it, largely because I’d been made to think through the practicalities: how I’d want my family to get the news, for instance, and which astronaut I should recruit to help my wife cut through the red tape at NASA and the CSA. Before my last space flight (as with each of the earlier ones) I reviewed my will, made sure my financial affairs and taxes were in order, and did all the other things you’d do if you knew you were going to die. But that didn’t make me feel like I had one foot in the grave. It actually put my mind at ease and reduced my anxiety about what my family’s future would look like if something happened to me. Which meant that when the engines lit up at launch, I was able to focus entirely on the task at hand: arriving alive.

I think about the sheer number of people who pulled together just to save my sorry ass, and I can barely comprehend it. My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they'd worked on for years just to provide a booster. The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollar. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we've dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

Every time I see a USA rocket launch, I am reminded of the millions of disabled people that were denied their disability benefits in order to fund it.

NASA has never launched a mission just because it “sounded like a good idea,” and neither should you.

I've already got the storm figured out. Some idiot blew up the sun. Some dumb Russian general pushed the wrong button and launched one of their million missiles, or maybe NASA misaimed one of our test rockets. Either way, the sun is gone and we're now engaged in a nuclear shootout. It's the end of everything. Batman and Superman aren't coming and James Bond doesn't have a trick up his sleeve to save us this time. In a week or a month, we'll all freeze to death, just like in that Twilight Zone episode where the pretty lady is burning up with fever, dreaming the sun is baking the world dry, when really the Earth has dropped out of orbit, is hurtling further and further away from the sun, rapidly turning into a big ball of ice.

The 5 Second Rule.” Just like NASA uses a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown to launch a rocket, I counted down 5-4-3-2-1 to launch myself into action before my negative thoughts pinned me down. I’m dead serious. Alarm rings. No staring at the ceiling. No panic attack. No snooze button. No rolling over and shoving your head under the pillow to blot out the day. 5-4-3-2-1: kick your own ass.

In 2012, a few months after Planetary Resources unveiled its plan at a press conference, NASA announced the Robotic Asteroid Prospector project, which will analyze the feasibility of mining them. Then, in the fall of 2016, NASA launched a billion-dollar probe, called OSIRIS-REx, to meet Bennu, an asteroid measuring sixteen hundred feet across that will pass the Earth in 2135.

NASA, fortunately, has already tackled the oxygen problem. When it launches the successor to the Curiosity rover in 2020, it will carry a type of fuel cell that will turn Mars’s atmospheric CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.

In the early 1980s, managers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimated that the flights would be 99.999 percent reliable, which represents a failure rate of only 1 in 100,000. According to the physicist Richard Feynman, who was a member of the commission that investigated the January 1986 Challenger accident, in which the shuttle broke apart shortly into its flight, killing all seven astronauts on board, this “would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one.” He wondered, “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?” Engineers, who were more familiar with the shuttle itself and with machines in general, predicted only a 99 percent success rate, or a failure every 100 launches. A range safety officer, who personally observed test firings during the developmental phase of the rocket motors, expected a failure rate of 1 in 25. The Challenger accident proved that estimate to be the actual failure rate, giving a success rate of 96 percent after exactly 25 launchings.

My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they’d worked on for years just to provide a booster. The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.

The foundation of your greatness is in your head. Your brain is the most sophisticated computer there is. Its ten billion parts can store the equivalent of one hundred trillion words. It would take dozens of buildings to house computers capable of containing that much information. You have the potential to become a gifted genius, because you were born with the equivalent of a Pentium 10000 processor with hundreds of “cores” and millions of gigabytes of memory. However, like any powerful computer, your brain requires to be turned on and programed properly! Any computer today has more capacity and processing power than all the computers used by NASA to send rockets to the moon. However, you cannot launch rockets from your iPhone (or your Galaxy!) because you don’t have the necessary software (and hopefully nor the rockets...) However, with the right apps, you COULD! It is the same with that amazing computer in your head: You have to turn it on, and then upload the right programs or apps that will allow you to develop your potential and achieve everything you set out to do in life.

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.

One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ ” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it make sense?’ ” All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study. Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. ‘Don’t worry,’ Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. 'Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.’ And then she did.

Beginning in 2011, SpaceX won a series of contracts from NASA to develop rockets that could take humans to the International Space Station, a task made crucial by the retirement of the Space Shuttle. To fulfill that mission, it needed to add to its facilities at Cape Canaveral’s Pad 40, and Musk set his sights on leasing the most storied launch facility there, Pad 39A. Pad 39A had been center stage for America’s Space Age dreams, burned into the memories of a television generation that held its collective breath when the countdowns got to “Ten, nine, eight…” Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon that Bezos watched as a kid blasted off from Pad 39A in 1969, as did the last manned moon mission, in 1972. So did the first Space Shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011. But by 2013, with the Shuttle program grounded and America’s half-century of space aspirations ending with bangs and whimpers, Pad 39A was rusting away and vines were sprouting through its flame trench. NASA was eager to lease it. The obvious customer was Musk, whose Falcon 9 rockets had already launched on cargo missions from the nearby Pad 40, where Obama had visited. But when the lease was put out for bids, Jeff Bezos—for both sentimental and practical reasons—decided to compete for it. When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.” He ridiculed Bezos’s rockets, pointing out that they were capable only of popping up to the edge of space and then falling back; they lacked the far greater thrust necessary to break the Earth’s gravity and go into orbit. “If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs,” Musk said. “Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.” The battle of the sci-fi barons had blasted off. One SpaceX employee bought dozens of inflatable toy unicorns and photographed them in the pad’s flame duct. Bezos was eventually able to lease a nearby launch complex at Cape Canaveral, Pad 36, which had been the origin of missions to Mars and Venus. So the competition of the boyish billionaires was set to continue. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy’s torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector—from a once-glorious but now sclerotic NASA to a new breed of mission-driven pioneers.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto two years ago. It was a three-billion mile trip that took nine and a half years. According to NASA, the trip “took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006.

From the early development period of the Space Shuttle through the end of 1985, the SRB work group had consistently defined the SRB joints as an acceptable risk. Behind this determination was a scientific paradigm that established the redundancy of the joint. The belief in redundancy and the scientific paradigm behind it were institutionalized prior to 1986. They were crucial components of the worldview that many decision makers brought to the teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch.

Peter Berger notes that the events that constitute our lives are subject to many interpretations, not just by outsiders, but by ourselves.7 When an unexpected event occurs, we need to explain it not only to others, but to ourselves.

Karl Weick observes that whenever people act in a context of choice, irreversible action, and public awareness, their actions tend to become binding;9 they become committed to their actions, then develop valid, socially acceptable justifications. Committed action, justifications, and meaning become linked. Actions “mean” whatever justifications become attached to them.

self-regulation of risky technical enterprise may, by definition, be accompanied by dependencies that interfere with regulatory effectiveness.

unruly technology,

Neither the SSCSP nor the ASAP identified the O-ring problems.

As Leon Ray said, “Safety people are not in a ‘doing mode’; they are in a ‘reviewing mode.’​

shared construction of temperature as a nonproblem,

That paradigm supported a belief that was central to their worldview: the belief in redundancy.

Alone, however, the social affirmation and commitment generated as work group decisions were processed are insufficient to explain the normalization of deviance. The culture of production and structural secrecy were environmental and organizational contingencies that caused the work group culture to persist.

Understanding the culture, as I discovered in the first year or so of my research, is absolutely essential to understanding what went on.

We correct history, reconstructing the past so that it will be consistent with the present, reaffirming our sense of self and place in the world. We reconstruct history every day, not to fool others but to fool ourselves, because it is integral to the process of going on.8 So we would expect that, in addition to the initial failure to register the teleconference fully, the effects of forgetting, the media effect on personal recollections, and the intentional self-protection in response to occupational risk, accounts of that evening would also be affected by the unconscious editing that goes on as people attempt to rescue order from disorder—perhaps driven in this case by a need to be guiltless, a need to have been “correct.

You must remember when watching your government’s rocket launches into Space, it has been funded by defunding social spending on society.

norms, values, and procedures that constituted a scientific paradigm.

The belief in redundancy was the product of the work group culture and the incremental accretion of history, ideas, and routines about the booster joints that began in 1977. It was based on a scientific paradigm in the Kuhnian sense: agreed-upon procedures for inquiry, categories into which observations were fitted, and a technology including beliefs about cause-effect relations and standards of practice in relation to it. These traits, reinforced by the cultural meaning systems that contributed to its institutionalization, gave the belief in redundancy the sort of obduracy Kuhn remarked upon.

A scientific paradigm is resistant to change. For those who adhere to its tenets, alteration requires a direct confrontation with information that contradicts it: a signal that is too clear to misperceive, too powerful to ignore.

In American Technological Sublime, David Nye argues that the American reverence for technology is such that we have invested technological masterworks with transcendent, near-religious significance.

The Challenger disaster was an accident, the result of a mistake. What is important to remember from this case is not that individuals in organizations make mistakes, but that mistakes themselves are socially organized and systematically produced. Contradicting

its origins were in routine and taken-for-granted aspects of organizational life that created a way of seeing that was simultaneously a way of not seeing. The normalization of deviant joint performance is the answer to both questions raised at the beginning of this book: Why did NASA continue to launch shuttles prior to 1986 with a design that was not performing as predicted? Why was the Challenger launched over the objections of engineers?

Official launch decisions accepting more and more risk were products of the production of culture in the SRB work group, the culture of production, and structural secrecy.

What is important about these three elements is that each, taken alone, is insufficient as an explanation. Combined, they constitute a nascent theory of the normalization of deviance in

A fundamental sociological notion is that choice creates structure, which in turn feeds back, influencing choice.

work group participants created an official cultural construction of risk that, once created, influenced subsequent choices.

First, the organization of the book places the Challenger launch decision in its proper position as one decision in a decision stream begun many years before.

Here, the chapter 1 version is repeated in boldface type, juxtaposed against another version that restores voices, actions, and details omitted from nearly all other accounts. Reconstructed in ethnographic thick description, this restoration of the confusion, diverse viewpoints, complexity of the technical issue and engineering arguments, and little-known aspects of interaction is, in itself, stereotype-shattering.

Moreover, distortions occurred because people felt their jobs were at risk. As Marshall’s Jim Smith recounted: “A lot of people became scarce when the accident happened. It was very obvious they tried to divorce themselves from much knowledge of any facts and I guess they felt their job was going to be in jeopardy too. It was obvious people were concerned about whether they literally would lose their jobs, or be totally removed from their position and put someplace else, in a corner, or whether there would be a possibility of some legal action.

As historical ethnography, this book is intended to create a social history that reveals how participants interpreted actions and events.

From this primer on the culture of risky decision making, now we turn to the decision making itself and the first of the two questions this book addresses: Why, in the years preceding the Challenger tragedy, did NASA proceed with launches with a design known to be flawed?

work group culture that repeatedly normalized the technical deviation of the joint from performance predictions.

He did not mention the Thiokol engineers’ concerns about temperature—a decision with which A1 McDonald agreed—because no systematic data were yet available that proved the association between the cold and the damage found on STS 51-C. Only “solid engineering data” were admissible in FRR presentation. Recall Boisjoly’s comment that the visual evidence of the black grease at disassembly was not considered “concrete evidence” and McDonald’s comment about “no hard data.

top NASA administrators had lost sight of the concept of “aggregate residual risk” that undergirded the Acceptable Risk Process.

We have an explanation of the normalization of deviance at NASA that includes the production of culture in the work group, the culture of production, and structural secrecy. In combination, they explain how an official collective construction of risk originated and persisted at the space agency,

According to Clarke, a disqualification heuristic is an “ideological mechanism or mind-set that leads experts and decision makers to neglect information that contradicts a conviction—in this case, a conviction that a sociotechnical system is safe.

both the Presidential Commission and the House Committee fully agreed on one point: “Neither NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident.”132 Commissioner Feynman observed, “The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood . . . officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the ‘success’ of previous flights.”133 Only in the wake of the tragedy was it clear they had not understood. At the end of 1985, they believed they did.

In particular, information dependencies affected regulators’ definition of the situation.

This chapter brings home the striking connection between social location, information, worldview, and response to events and activities.

The shared official construction of risk is particularly interesting in light of the way understanding varied with position in the organizational structure

Unfavorable information is lost, not by malicious intent, purposeful concealment, or reluctance to say something superiors do not want to hear (all psychological in origin), but as a collective and systemic consequence of organizational structure and roles: people deliberately do not seek out unfavorable information. He notes, “The technological consequences of such distortions can be disastrous.

It enables them to selectively focus on confirming information while relegating disconfirming information to secondary or even trivial status. In the Exxon Valdez case that Clarke studied, the failure to take into account information that disconfirmed beliefs about system safety led to inadequate preparation for major oil spills.

Bella argues that one way to combat the filtering of unfavorable information is to create checks and balances that systematically force it to surface. This strategy would also be an antidote to the ideological mind set that drives Clarke’s disqualification heuristic.

FRR debates were governed by rules, procedures, and norms deliberately created to seek unfavorable information that challenged the decisions to accept risk and fly that were being presented: a matrix system that brought in a variety of specialists; the “fishbowl” atmosphere; proactive inquiry via “probes,” “challenges,” and Action Items; competition between projects; adversarialism; and the certification at each level that implicated all levels in the outcome.

This paradox—a worldview that survives despite evidence that repeatedly challenges its basic assumptions—is well known among researchers interested in the sociology of science and technology, who often have noted the “obduracy” of established perspectives or paradigms in the face of anomalous information.

ethnocognition: the way members of a particular group produce a definitive mental model as they construct, negotiate, and assemble knowledge to give meaning to an object.

Marcus notes, somewhat ironically, that decisions about all the scientific and engineering problems that affect society lie someplace between the extremes of perfect knowledge and perfect ignorance.50

Although the results may convince a wider audience, the “core set”—the working engineers and scientists most closely associated with the technology—understand the precariousness of this closure, for they are most intimately aware of the test result that does not conform to the others, the limitations of design, the ambiguity surrounding the various engineering interpretations that are embedded in day-to-day engineering work.

The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure.

Failure is inherent in all useful design not only because all requirements of economy derive from insatiable wishes, but more immediately because certain quite specific conflicts are inevitable once requirements for economy are admitted; and conflicts even among the requirements of use are not unknown.

Solutions are always a compromise among a number of standard requirements: safety; reliability; long-term economy; minimum of labor; practicality; ease of manufacturing and installation, maintenance, and operation; and aesthetics.

Safety, too, is integral to the engineering worldview. Engineers design to avoid failure.

Attesting to the nested quality of culture, NASA’s entire Shuttle Program exhibited the “unruly technology” that characterizes the engineering craft when complex technical systems are involved: interpretive flexibility, absence of appropriate guidelines, unexpected glitches as commonplace, “debugging through use,” extensive systemwide problems with technical components, practical rules based on experience that supplemented and took precedence in technical decision making over formal, universal rules, and cost/safety compromises as taken-for-granted.

When technical systems fail, however, outside investigators consistently find an engineering world characterized by ambiguity, disagreement, deviation from design specifications and operating standards, and ad hoc rule making.

In Craft and Consciousness, Bensman and Lilienfeld show the relationship between worldview and the occupational technique and methodology of many occupations and professions.

The public is deceived by a myth that the production of scientific and technical knowledge is precise, objective, and rule-following.

One way to overturn an entrenched scientific paradigm is with contradictory information that is an attention-getting signal, too strong to explain away, refute, or deny.

The structure of regulatory relations created obstacles to social control, limiting information and knowledge about the O-ring problems. It inhibited the ability of safety regulators to alter the scientific paradigm on which the belief in acceptable risk was based.

Regulatory effectiveness was blocked by autonomy, or the fact that regulators and the organizations they regulate exist as separate, independent organizations, and interdependence, or the fact that regulators and regulatees are linked so that outcomes for each are, in part, determined by the activities of the other.

Each strategy has unique advantages, but each also has disadvantages that routinely undermine regulatory effectiveness.

Thus, external regulators frequently become dependent on the regulated organization for information and its interpretation.

One kind of interdependence is when regulator and regulatee share a goal or interests: when harm or good fortune befalls one, the well-being of the other is similarly affected.

Shortly after the 1967 Apollo launch pad fire that killed three astronauts, Congress added an external regulatory body composed of aerospace experts: the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). This legislative action was guided by the notion that expert outsiders, with technical experience and reputation throughout the aerospace industry, would have both the objectivity, the knowledge, and the influence to balance NASA’s self-regulating system.

Barley, Stephen R. “Semiotics and the Study of Occupational and Organizational Cultures.” Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983): 393–413.

Becker, Howard S. “Culture: A Sociological View.” Yale Review 71 (1982): 513–28.

Bensman, Joseph, and Israel Gerver. “Crime and Punishment in the Factory: The Function of Deviancy in Maintaining the Social System.” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 588–98.

. “Organizations and Systematic Distortion of Information.” Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering 113 (1987): 360–70.

For the better part of seven decades, watching rockets launch from Cape Canaveral has been a major tourist attraction, a favorite activity of locals, and a taken-for-granted part of Florida life. Few experiences in this lifetime are as awe-inspiring as watching a rocket launch not more than five miles from the launch site. When NASA lights the fuse on these babies, the solid rocket boosters blast the payload into space with several million pounds of thrust. Words cannot adequately describe the sight, sound, and feel of one of these events-- like the Grand Canyon and oral sex, it must be experienced to be appreciated.

I was asking people, "Have you ever seen a night launch before?" One guy answered, "Not from the outside, no." You have to be careful about trying to be cool at a Rockwell party.

The culture of production was a key environmental contingency that was part of their worldview. The culture of production included norms and beliefs originating in the aerospace industry, the engineering profession, and the NASA organization, then uniquely expressed in the culture of Marshall Space Flight Center. It legitimated work group decision making, which was acceptable and nondeviant within that context.

When signals of potential danger occurred on the eve of the Challenger launch, the patterns that shaped decision making in the past—the production of culture, the culture of production, and structural secrecy—were reproduced in interaction, to devastating effect. The norms, beliefs, and procedures that affirmed risk acceptability in the work group were a part of the worldview that many brought to the teleconference discussion.

This is the problem of the normalization of deviance. Three factors, with which we will be occupied throughout this book, explain the normalization of deviance: the production of a work group culture, the culture of production, and structural secrecy.

Individuals assess risk as they assess everything else—through the filtering lens of individual worldview.

From integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experience, individuals construct a worldview, or frame of reference, that shapes their interpretations of objects and experiences.93 Everything is perceived, chosen, or rejected on the basis of this framework. The framework becomes self-confirming because, whenever they can, people tend to impose it on experiences and events, creating incidents and relationships that conform to it. And they tend to ignore, misperceive, or deny events that do not fit.94

As a consequence, this frame of reference generally leads people to what they expect to find. Worldview is not easily altered or dismantled because individuals tend ultimately to disavow knowledge that contradicts it.95 They ward off information in order to preserve the status quo, avoid a difficult choice, or avoid a threatening situation. They may puzzle over contradictory evidence but usually succeed in pushing it aside—until they come across a piece of evidence too fascinating to ignore, too clear to misperceive, too painful to deny, which makes vivid still other signals they do not want to see, forcing them to alter and surrender the worldview they have so meticulously constructed.

three factors that scholars traditionally associated with misconduct by organizations.

They do not weigh all possible outcomes but instead rely on a few key values. The magnitude of possible bad outcomes is more salient, so that there is less risk taking when greater stakes are involved. But even then, they do not quantify and calculate: they “feel it,” because quantifying costs and benefits is not easy.

Decision making is more an example of rule following than of calculation of costs and benefits.

First, I will present the evidence that initially persuaded me that the environmental pressures NASA experienced resulted in amoral calculation, building an argument that coincides with conventional interpretations. Then, I will gradually dismantle that straw man, showing how still deeper immersion in the documentary record led me to a different understanding.

David Collingridge, in his book The Social Control of Technology, notes that many decisions about risky technology are most accurately described as “decision making under ignorance” because from a technical standpoint all conditions can never be known.

Turner’s distinction between ill-structured and well-structured problems applies.

Accepting erosion was a major turning point in the work group’s normalization of technical deviation.

Then they have to come up with the worst case: here’s the design; what’s the worst thing that can happen? And you do [calculate and test] worst cases. You just sit there and the guys go through that thing—worst case, worst case, worst case.

So it’s that kind of engineering, quality engineering, reliability engineering, that has to go into every one of those single point failure modes.