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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If man had wings, he would have polluted the sky. Houston we have a problem. The era when scientific progress seemed unstoppable has stopped today, showing the weaknesses of governments and peoples to the whole world in the face of any virus. Fifty years ago the question that afflicted some "powerful" states, concerned the ability to reach the mysterious space, an undertaking that, given the age, seemed increasingly difficult. Today, however, the biggest mission the world is facing is to survive, trying to make people holed up in their homes. But where is the meaning of all this? How did we go from the time when everything was possible and the economy seemed unstoppable, to that in which there are no ways to produce simple masks in a short time? Why did we spend almost a century trying to reach the Moon, Mars and the whole Universe, rather than taking care of our fellow men and our planet that collapsed towards extinction minute by minute? It is certainly no coincidence that while the world is facing a Covid-19 pandemic, NASA is committed to managing the upcoming "Mars 2020" mission with launch scheduled for 17 July 2020. The main objective of this new mission it to look for traces of possible Martian microbes and collect soil samples. You would agree with me in affirming that the sense of the space mission, nowadays, could look more like a demonstration of man's superiority over nature and towards the unknown, than a journey to get to know and understand the infinite mysteries of space and its planets? There is something within our world that pushes us to never appreciate what we have, to want more and more, to the point where we begin to sacrifice the most important and indispensable things, in order to reach questionable new horizons. In this way, governments prefer to invest in weapons rather than in health, in multinationals, rather than supporting education, in space missions rather than taking care of our environment, making the world unprepared for an emergency like a pandemic. And here we are, while fifty years ago we were with our eyes glued to a screen and our breath suspended in order to become witnesses of the Apollo 13 mission, today we stare at our televisions while we see the hundreds of thousands in the mouth of death that our world has to spare them. And so, while we have to deal with our indifference and our mistakes, Mother Nature, who for centuries and centuries has been disfigured of all beauty, today comes back to life, showing herself more alive than ever. Nature is regaining its footing and repopulating lands and seas, cities are less polluted and finally you can breathe clean air. Once again, our planet shows us how powerful it is and how it can put man in his place in a few moments. So, for the umpteenth time we are forced to face the fate that we built with indifference and arrogance, forgetting about our eternal vulnerability. Yes Houston, we still have a problem. It's called "human ignorance" disguised as a philosophy of futility.

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.

consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks (ETs). Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on reentry. At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere.

Flying saucers aside, a visceral childhood fascination with what’s out there, launched by pop culture and propelled by real-life space missions during NASA’s heyday, is a recurring narrative among SETI researchers. “I’m a child of the Apollo era,” said Mark Showalter, a Sagan Center senior research scientist. “I’m in this room today because of Neil Armstrong. Watching the moonwalk — that was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life.” To date, Showalter has discovered, or co-discovered, six moons in the solar system: Pan (orbiting Saturn); Mab and Cupid (Uranus); Kerberos and Styx (Pluto); and just last year, a Neptune moon, still unnamed. “We could be sending missions to all kinds of fantastic destinations and learning things for decades to come,” he said. But the scheduled NASA voyages to the outer planets appear nearly done.  The New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto next year; the probes to Jupiter and Saturn shut down in 2017. Even the much-heralded Clipper mission — the proposed robotic expedition to Europa — isn’t yet a go. So far, with a projected $2 billion cost, only $170 million has been appropriated. At 56, Showalter concedes that his professional career will conclude with these final journeys. “It takes twenty years from the time you start thinking about the project to the time you actually get to the outer planets,” he said. And without new missions, he worries, and wonders, about the new generation. “It’s the missions that capture imaginations. If those aren’t happening, kids might not go into science the way my generation did.

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.

One of my favorite retailers has a release process that rivals a NASA launch sequence.

The Obama administration sees government agencies as political tools to advance its agenda, as we have seen with NASA’s new Muslim outreach, the IRS hounding of conservative nonprofit groups, and the patent office’s antagonization of the Redskins. The October missiles of 1962 were never launched, but the crisis still forced JFK to adopt a new realism about the Soviet Union. In contrast, for Obama to meet these current October threats head-on, he first would have to admit they were largely self-created.

At 5.30 a.m. Washington time, the Moscow News radio channel announced Gagarin’s successful landing and recovery. An alert journalist called NASA’s launch centre in Florida to ask if America could catch up. Press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was trying to catch a few hours’ rest in his cramped office cot. He and many other NASA staffers were working 16-hour days in the lead-up to astronaut Alan Shepard’s first flight in a Mercury capsule. When the phone at his side rang in the pre-dawn silence, he was irritable and unprepared. ‘Hey, what is this!’ he yelled into the phone. ‘We’re all asleep down here!’ Next morning the headlines read: ‘SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS US ASLEEP.

With an accelerated schedule of launch in just two months, NASA and contractor launch and support teams labor steadily with six-day work weeks by day and night shifts

In April 1968, a test launch with an unmanned Apollo 6 capsule aboard suffered from a “pogo effect.” Unnerved NASA engineers watched as their thirty-six-stories-tall rocket bounced across the pad for half a minute before finally achieving liftoff.

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.

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.

In 1989 the search for these ripples was intensified when NASA launched the $200 million satellite aptly called COBE for Cosmic Background Explorer. Carrying extremely sensitive instruments, COBE was able to see whether or not these ripples actually existed in the background radiation and how precise they were.

The equipment for this undertaking is being designed, built, and managed by the Johns Hopkins APL.46 The contract for the mission’s launch was awarded to SpaceX in April of 2019, and the mission is scheduled for takeoff on a Falcon 9 craft in June of 2021.47 Of interest in addition to the mission itself is the fact that experts across the world will be watching for indications of success or failure. The European Space Agency has gone so far as to design what is being called a “companion mission,” a probe that will follow the DART

Every time I see a USA rocket launch, I sit there thinking ‘What an obscene waste of money’.

Charles Du designed NASA’s first iPhone app, an award winner and a huge hit with more than 10 million downloads. But he also faced challenges from NASA brass who tried to water down his vision for the app. In a guest blog for Aha!, he laid out a basic principle: Maintaining your product vision is just as important as getting buy-in for that vision. After I got buy-in for the NASA app, a project manager was assigned to our team . . . a project manager is not the same as a product manager. Since my project manager didn’t understand the difference between the two roles and had seniority over me, we fought many battles. The vision of the app was user-driven. So, I validated my product hypothesis by talking to users and looking at our website metrics — a user-centered design approach. The project manager took a different approach. She saw this app as an opportunity to get more resources for our local center . . . She was advocating for politics-centered design that was divorced from any customer conversations. To me, this is a clear case of why product vision should drive everything you do as a product manager. I had clearly communicated why the vision for this app would achieve NASA’s high-level goals. This allowed senior leadership to see that I was working to help grow the whole organization. And it prevented politics from entering the picture. . . . We ended up launching a pure product designed 100 percent for our users — and it was a huge success.11

Consider this: in February of 1966, the Soviet Union soft-landed a space probe on the moon. Humanity has been launching programs ever since. NASA launched Voyager 1 in September of 1977. In 2012 it became the first satellite to reach interstellar space. At some point, Voyager will fall into the gravity well of a planet, or asteroid, or even another planet’s moon. Possibly a black hole. The point is that it will crash somewhere—maybe on a place like our moon, but orbiting another planet, very far away.” Yuri smiled. “And if that’s true, then why has it not happened here—on our moon, which is over four and a half billion years old? The greatest mystery in the world is why our moon isn’t covered with space junk.” “Space junk?” “Interstellar probes—like Voyager 1—from other sentient species across the universe, launched long before we evolved, launched long before there was even life on our world.

The China National Space Agency (created in 1993) may be the formal NASA equivalent, facilitating international agreements and cooperation, but it still operates in tandem with the PLA and is involved in the defense industry.12 The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned company, specializes in tactical ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, anti-satellite interceptors, and small tactical satellites. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation produces launch vehicles and large satellites. Both of these organizations operate closely together.

When NASA launched an internal investigation in the wake of the Challenger explosion, they made a startling discovery – many who worked on the project had misgivings about whether or not the shuttle was ready to be launched, but didn’t speak up for fear that doing so would hamper their careers and make it seem like they did not have faith in the NASA program.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different. When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. I’ll teach you about these three pillars and more in the coming chapters, but for now just realize the time Apple spent clarifying the role they play in their customers’ story is one of the primary factors responsible for their growth. Notice, though, the story of Apple isn’t about Apple; it’s about you. You’re the hero in the story, and they play a role more like Q in the James Bond movies. They are the guy you go see when you need a tool to help you win the day.

Every time they delayed a scheduled launch, they faced widespread public criticism and threats to funding. Each time they celebrated a flight that made it into orbit, they were encouraging their engineers to focus on the fact that the launch resulted in a success rather than on the faulty processes that could jeopardize future launches. That left NASA rewarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to rethink what qualified as an acceptable risk. It wasn’t for a lack of ability. After all, these were rocket scientists.

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

They were productively adversarial, like superforecasting team discussions. Managers grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions. The process had worked remarkably. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, and all twenty-four flights had returned safely. But on the emergency conference call, that same quantitative culture led them astray. On their engineers’ advice, McDonald and two Thiokol VPs on the call initially supported a no-launch decision. The Challenger had already been cleared, so this was an eleventh-hour reversal. When NASA officials asked Thiokol engineers exactly what temperature range was safe for flight, they recommended setting a limit at 53 degrees, the lower bound of previous experience. NASA manager Larry Mulloy was flabbergasted. He thought the shuttle was supposed to be cleared to launch from 31 to 99 degrees. A last-minute 53-degree limit was setting an entirely new technical criteria for launches. It had never been discussed, was not backed by quantitative data, and meant that suddenly winter was off-limits for space exploration. Mulloy found it frustrating; he later called it “dumb.” How had the engineers arrived at that number? “They said because they had flown at 53 degrees before,” a NASA manager reflected, “which is no reason to me. That’s tradition rather than technology.” Boisjoly was asked again for data to support his claim, “and I said I have none other than what is being presented.” With the conference call at an impasse, a Thiokol VP asked for a five-minute “offline caucus,” during which Thiokol concluded that they had no more data to provide. They returned to the call a half hour later with a new decision: proceed with launch. Their official document read, “temperature data not conclusive on predicting primary O-ring blow-by.” When conference call participants from NASA and Thiokol later spoke with investigators and gave interviews, they repeatedly brought up the “weak engineering position,” as one put it. Their statements comprised a repetitive chorus: “Unable to quantify”; “supporting data was subjective”; “hadn’t done a good technical job”; “just didn’t have enough conclusive data.” NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.

But those achievements pale next to the audacity of trying to send humans to Mars, which remains far beyond the present-day capability of NASA or any other space agency around the world. Even with an annual budget approaching $25 billion a year, and some of the smartest scientists and engineers anywhere, the space agency that landed humans on the Moon remains several giant leaps away from sending a few astronauts to Mars.

Then they checked to see what would happen under a worst-on-worst (WOW) condition (rare circumstances in which a number of negative conditions occur simultaneously)

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.

As Marshall’s Ben Powers explained: “The whole concept of redundancy is that if the primary system doesn’t function, the secondary system will. Therefore, if the primary system fails and the secondary system backs it up, the system is working as expected. Building in redundancy is expensive. You don’t build it in unless you expect to use it.

By analogy Marshall’s Wiley C. Bunn, Director of Reliability and Quality Assurance, describes the engineering work and data that constitute the Rationale for Retention, necessary for all C 1 items:

C 1 item.

Fail-safe’ is defined as the ability to sustain a failure and retain the capability to successfully terminate the mission.

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.

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.

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

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.

Failure History: No failures have been experienced in the static firing of three qualification motors, five development motors and ten flight motors.

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.

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.

Since culture itself is not visible, one way we can know it is by inspecting events to see how people interacting in groups identify define, and transform previously known cultural items and create a distinctive culture of their own.2

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.

The second factor reinforcing work group decision making was structural secrecy: patterns of information, the organizational structure, and the structure of regulatory relations perpetuated the normalization of deviance.

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.

Anybody can write an ECR. It has to be formally dispositioned. There is no ducking it. Thiokol has a similar system. All the aerospace contractors have this approach.

The sessions were open. The matrix system brought in many people from outside the work groups.

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

The five-step decision sequence shows the pattern characterizing their interpretive work, indicating the work group’s production of culture.

For engineers, a design is a hypothesis to be tested.105

STS-1 affirmed these choices and what was to become the dominant ideology of the work group in the years preceding the Challenger tragedy: the belief in redundancy.

Acceptable Risk Process.

Organizations no doubt have failures more frequently than we realize. Only when these failures lead to harmful consequences that then publicly become defined as failures (an important distinction) do outsiders have the opportunity to consider the cause.

Turner, in Man-made Disasters, notes the tendency for a problem that was ill structured in an organization to become a well-structured problem after a disaster, as people look back and reinterpret information ignored or minimized at the time, that afterward takes on new significance as signals of danger.

From these chapters, we can infer the existence of culture through the patterned behaviors, we can identify common understandings, we can discover inconsistencies among group members and witness how this within-group variation was resolved. These

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.

Unable to retain all the details, they latched on to whatever for them explained the unexplainable and went on.

Normalizing signals of potential danger is not a problem over which NASA had exclusive domain. The normalization of deviance is common to organizations and individuals alike, resulting in mistake, mishap, and misconduct, too often with disastrous consequences

A final note: The effect of worldview on the interpretation of information is well documented in scientific research, despite the introduction of tools and techniques to control these very human tendencies.114

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

shared construction of temperature as a nonproblem,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

unruly technology,