Columbia Mission

Columbia Final Mission Case Study: What went wrong…

1. The organizational structure is bottlenecked and it is not efficient to resolve problems. The leaders that are there don’t have authority to resolve the issue.

2. Two major issues that occurred in space flights were the Foam and the O-Rings disasters. These were considered “in-family issue” they were expected to have issues so nobody ever tried to reduce the effects of the debris or attempted to resolve the some what small issues. They became an acceptable flight risk.

3. Due to small increments of damage over the years and because no one issue was a threat nobody reacted, however the combination of them proved to be a fatal mission. Also due to tardiness of looking for a problem it was not repairable fast enough.

4. Again a organizational structure failure, the DAT team or known earlier as the Tiger Team did not have a person to report to. The two teams DAT and Mission Management team never communicated.

5. Aside the fact that many people were assigned to assess the issues given people listened to the wrong people at the same time. Many people were under educated and new to there job. Many people were considered experts in there field however they answered questions which they were not experts at. The approach of the problem was very lackadaisical, people who assed the problems were not overly concerned because everyone assumed it would be fine.

Questions to Answer:

1. How could the change of command be solved without firing too many people?

2. Should NASA adopt the mantra “prove to me it right” not cultural easiness of prove to me there is something wrong?

3. Why were the DAT (Debris Assessment Teams) teams and MMT (Mission Management Teams), in more in communication with each other, and attempt to really resolve the issue?

4. Why was an in-experienced crater-certified engineer the only major source, why not get a second opinion form a more practiced and certified technical engineer and use them both as part of the review process?

5. Even though there is a constant search for power, human life is crucial, this insight was forgotten, the priority was lost. In the search for more power control the 2nd in command dismissed an issue that could have potentially delay their time to be in control.