Well, that was 2003. I live in N.E. NC and my parents were down (from Upstate NY) visiting. I was driving my Dad somewhere and we heard on the radio. I said: “There goes another one”. We went home and turned on the tv (again).
Yep I was a sophomore taking Calculus II.
That class was tough because of all the geometry
At that time I had my job where I traveled a lot in Asia. I had just flown across the Pacific and was changing planes in, I believe, Taipei on the way to Manila. I stopped to check the news on the computers there, and that came up. I remember seeing the coverage on the news later that day once I got to the Philippines.
I had a different reaction. By that time NASA had lost its halo and had screwed up enough before so that everybody knew that they weren’t this wonderful can-do organization with impeccable quality control. When the news about how the o-rings caused the Challenger disaster and how people there knew about that issue came out, that was a shock. When the story came out about Columbia and the foam insulatin, to me it was like, “They still haven’t learned a damn thing and effed-up again.”
A while back on the CHB I linked to this article on the failure of the Fresh and Easy supermarket chain. It includes this snippet on what happened at NASA.
Why they did not is best explained by a phenomenon that psychologists call “groupness,” which is explained in a great essay in the National Geographic Blog — much of it focusing on why A&P couldn’t sustain its leadership position and why NASA had the Challenger and Columbia tragedies:
Behavior like that, seemingly contrary and nonsensical, stems at least in part from a phenomenon that psychologists call “groupness.” Coined by a social psychologist at Oxford University named Henri Tajfel, the term refers to the tendency of various animals, including humans, to form in-groups.
When the in-group encounters individuals from outside the group, the default response is hostility. People protect their group from outsiders and from outside influences. For example, we will reject information, habits, and culture from other groups.
The power of groupness is not to be underestimated. If a group invests a lot of effort in a goal and succeeds, its boundaries become stronger, and it tends to become even more hostile to outside influences. This may not be overt hostility. It may simply be a subtle and unconscious tendency to reject anything from another group.
NASA has lost two space shuttles, costing the lives of 14 crew members, and groupness was at least partly to blame. The astounding effort and success of the Apollo program had created a culture… NASA defined itself as technically excellent — “the perfect place,” as one researcher called it. They put a man on the moon, and it was hard to argue with success. The insidious message was: We know what we’re doing. The corollary to that is: You can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.
By the time components of the space shuttle began failing (the O-rings in the case of Challenger and the foam insulation in the case of Columbia), NASA managers were so blinded by groupness that they could not recognize that those malfunctions were clear signs of impending disaster.
The official report on the crash of Columbia said, “External criticism and doubt . . . reinforced the will to ‘impose the party line vision on the environment, not to reconsider it . . .’ This in turn led to ‘flawed decision-making, self-deception, introversion and diminished curiosity about the world outside the perfect place.’”
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