Columbia Investigation Continues
Some interesting things have been happening in the grinding-slow-but-exceedingly-fine investigation into the Columbia shuttle disaster. From Reuters, here’s a story from the other day: ‘Missed signals’ seen at NASA in Columbia probe. The AP version of the same Senate testimony is here: Shuttle probe chief calls on Senate panel.
The back and forth reported between the retired admiral heading up the investigation and Sen. John McCain was interesting, with the investigator claiming the process whereby engineers’ concerns were ignored by higher-ups was “nobody’s fault,” and McCain getting pissed at the idea that seven astronauts could be killed due to a string of human errors in which, magically, no humans were actually responsible.
Chiming in on the obvious deja vu qualities in all this, USA Today has the following editorial: Same problems haunt NASA 17 years after Challenger loss. And if you want to really get into the nitty gritty of what went wrong, and if you haven’t seen it already, check out this interesting discussion from visual-display-of-information maven Edward Tufte. Nice detail on the contribution that some really yucky Powerpoint bullet slides made to the tragedy.
