12 February 2003

Cultural divide persists between engineers and managers at NASA After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman asked NASA officials what risk of failure each mission carried. NASA engineers said about 1 in every 100 flights was likely to experience a catastrophe. NASA managers put the risk closer to 1 in 100,000. Technical people tend to assess risk based on individual components, which can behave unpredictably in the hostile environment of shuttle launches and reentry. Engineers know that solutions to problems often create other problems. Managers tend to look at the big picture, and base their assessments of safety partly on the previous number of safe flights flown. In the Columbia investigation, managers say they discounted the damage done by a piece of foam to the underside of Columbia's wing during liftoff because such damage had happened many times before -- and those shuttles had all come back safely. "Each time it ran a risk and succeeded, the institution learned the wrong lesson," said Charles Bosk, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies why organizations fail. "Instead of saying, 'I was lucky,' you say, 'Maybe that wasn't so risky after all.' " [...] "You don't want the hubris of imagining we can overcome everything," Bosk said, "but without that hubris, you can't create the enterprise. How do you instill a spirit of adventure, and at the same time have the humility to recognize all the things that could go wrong? One doesn't go very well with the other." 9:32:59 AM     comments

Old but worth posting again: They Write the Right Stuff How software is written for the shuttle. Not your average development process. 9:31:39 AM     comments