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Cautionary Tales · January 28, 2021 · 42m

The Deadly Icicles of the Space Shuttle Challenger

Cautionary Tales

The Challenger disaster of 1986 — when NASA launched a shuttle despite engineers' warnings that cold weather would cause the O-ring seals to fail. Harford examines how institutional pressure overrode technical expertise.

Highlights

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When the people with knowledge lack power, and the people with power lack knowledge, disasters follow
Morton Thiokol engineers knew the O-rings would fail in cold weather. NASA managers needed the launch. The engineers' technical knowledge was overruled by managerial authority.
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Normalization of deviance — NASA had seen O-ring erosion on previous flights and treated it as acceptable
Harford traces how O-ring erosion had been observed on multiple previous shuttle flights. Each time, when the shuttle survived, the erosion was reclassified from 'dangerous anomaly' to 'acceptable risk.' This gradual normalization made Challenger inevitable.
ClaudeChatGPTGemini