Nasa Ob Issue

The Columbia disaster was a product of NASA’s organizational issues. Throughout the mission, safety did not have the highest priority in the Columbia disaster. Competing with safety were the often-conflicting goals of cost, time and efficiency. NASA’s goal conflicts is one major contribution to the catastrophe. Throughout the process, managers and engineers struggled with their professional differences and conflicting interests. However, for program’s continued survival, managers were so focused on reaching their goals that the foam insulation problems did not induce them to shift their attention to safety. Scheduling served as a detriment to safety in NASA’s decision to launch, and ultimately helped create blind spots that prevented these decision makers from seeing the danger of the foam insulation strike. Another contributing factors to the explosion is the long time periods of repeated success on similar missions. Such track record of success led to organizationally weak responses to the danger of foam insulation strikes. Since foam loss has never been a serious threat, but an acceptable risk; program decision makers had increasingly ignored such risk and excused the problem, which is a strong contributor to a broken safety structure leading up to the shuttle explosion.

Coupling with NASA’s history and inconsistent goals, organizational tendencies for overconfidence bias, confirmation bias and groupthink error in decision making also led into the dysfunctional outcome. Repeated successes imprinted an optimism, nuance-insensitive culture at NASA, and made it overconfident in its capability to operate safely. The mission managers continued to use O-rings in space flights despite documented evidence of major problems of it. Instead of maintaining skepticism about safety indicators, program managers entered foam-strikes into their logs as “low concern”, and further degraded the criticality rating of O-ring problem. Some analysts even were not concerned with the...