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Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people

387 points by newzisgud 7y ago

nyx_ 7y ago
The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007). The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
- wycy 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I noticed the typo of "hanrd" ("hard") on the re-creation and drew the further conclusion that they weren't even taking the issue seriously enough to pay attention to their slide content. Even though it doesn't change what ultimately happened, it's nice to know that someone was paying at least cursory attention.
  - Zanni 7y ago
    Indeed. I missed "hanrd" on my first read through, but "Vaires" and the stray "?" jumped out at me. The original slide is much more readable, and "Flight condition is significantly outside of test database" stands out as almost the conclusion rather than being buried in noise. Talk about a strawman. (Still a bad slide, though.)
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Why would someone recreate that slide instead of just using the original? Gah, that's sloppy reporting. Makes me suspect the entire story told, now that you pointed that out.
  - bumby 7y ago
    There's other sloppiness here as well, like treating the orbiter velocity as the determining factor (nine times the speed of a bullet...) when the delta-V between the foam and the orbiter is the more pertinent information. The author comes across like they have an axe to grind (maybe rightly so) but should make better efforts at getting technical details right in an article about the perils of miscommunicating technical details
- erobbins 7y ago
  So if I'm reading this right, the previous testing was done with a 3 cubic inch foam block at 200 ft/sec impact velocity... and the foam ramp was 1900 cubic inches and going 900 feet/sec at impact. This is like saying "shooting someone in the head with a BB gun doesn't kill them, so we think shooting them in the head with a shotgun slug should be fine." What on earth were these people thinking?
- ineedasername 7y ago
  That same linked page by Edward Tufte (of data visualization fame) has a proposed revised slide that would have more adequately conveyed the risk
supahfly_remix 7y ago
We weren't at the briefing. Surely the briefer could have emphasized these points, rather than just relying on the slide itself to convey the seriousness of the situation. Or, the judgement of the audience to pick up that they hadn't tested for this situation. I like Tufte as much as anyone else, but he's in the business of selling courses.
protomyth 7y ago
No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible. On a side note, the whole first paragraph is just plain insulting to anyone who is making a life or death decision. If that is the attitude of anyone in the meeting, then they shouldn't have that job.
- davidmr 7y ago
  There’s definitely audio from all those meetings. You can hear the mission manager plow right through the issues with bureaucratic ease. They’ve seen something similar before and even though it was unexplained, because they’ve seen it, they think it’s a known issue. You want to blame her for it and shake her out of it as you hear her say it, but it wasn’t malicious. I believe the mission manager even had a spouse who was an astronaut, so it’s obviously not like they don’t care. I’ve always found it fascinating how organizational structure and pressure can take really brilliant and motivated people and beat them into making such poor decisions. It’s really important to remember that these people are not idiots. It’s literally a room of rocket scientists and space shuttle mission managers. It’s so easy for us all to say here that it was so easy to see it happening and that anyone who didn’t ask the right question was a moron, but these structures take on a life of their own. If I had it to start all over again, studying that would make a fascinating and potentially rewarding career.
  - OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
    I don't think anyone is saying that it was malicious, but it was absolutely negligent. For people with decisional authority, organizational pressure is not an excuse. For people with responsibility, lapsed vigilance is not acceptable. They weren't forced to make a split-second decision, and they weren't fatigued. While there were contributing systemic factors, this was still a mistake to dismiss the information so quickly. They're professionals, not amateurs.
veryworried 7y ago
I thought this was going to be a more direct kill, as in maybe a slide that flashed bright colors very quickly and killed people who got seizures from it.
davidmr 7y ago
As much as I appreciate the sentiment and I never like to miss a chance to pile on PowerPoint, this is really, really missing the point. As the CAIB report makes clear, the PowerPoint slide was a small symptom of the actual problem of a complex organization gradually accepting more and more risk as “in family” simply because unexplained phenomena hadn’t caused serious issues before (while remaining unexplained). The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time.
- icelancer 7y ago
  > The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time. Agreed. It is a useful document to read for anyone who plans meetings and heavily relies on consensus to see where the problems lay. You need outsiders and first principles thinkers (physicists are good options, as Feynman always demonstrates) to disrupt bureaucratic agreement.
- paultopia 7y ago
  Yeah, I think this is right. Which doesn't detract from the slide being terrible, but just adds a bit more about why the slide was terrible. Edit: from the summary of chapter 7 of the CAIB report [1]: "organizational barriers which prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion;" http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/CAIB_lowres_chapter7.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/C...
Isamu 7y ago
Tufte makes a good point that the critical information could have been conveyed so much more effectively. If only the managers had been given a better summary! But I think this is a vast over-simplification. Even with a crystal-clear summary of the issues, it doesn't always add up to a clear disaster on your hands. Only in hindsight. The shuttle was an incredibly complex system and there were always issues to examine, to fix, to prioritize, to defer. There is just a lot to regularly weigh.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pressurefree 7y ago
Perl is still living in their Hamlet fodder world
js2 7y ago
> They rejected the other options I didn’t think there were any options. Indeed the managers didn’t think so. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste... > Throughout the risk assessment process, senior NASA managers were influenced by their belief that nothing could be done even if damage were detected. However the CAIB determined Atlantis could have been used as a rescue vehicle had NASA acted quickly enough. It also put forth a high risk repair procedure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Possible_emergency_procedures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
- PopePompus 7y ago
  There were a number of things they could have tried. No one of the alternatives (except launching a rescue shuttle) could possibly have turned out worse than the course they chose. Instead of an Apollo-13 style "Failure is not an option" effort, Jon Harpold, then the director of Mission Operations, is reported to have said "You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the thermal protection system. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/columbia-space-shuttle-anniversary-nasa https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/columbia-space...
  - Endy 7y ago
    In my life up until now, I'd always believed the best of people and doubly so of NASA. Seeing that, and knowing it's true, makes me believe that there is evil in this world. And that man is part of it. Whoever and whatever forces allowed him to get where he was with opinions like that, needlessly sacrificing the lives of seven people and being satisfied that he'd made the right decision needs to be brought to account, publicly and with no means of secrecy.
    - scott_s 7y ago
kangnkodos 7y ago
During that final Columbia flight, I remember reading a short news story on the internet on the foam falling off. It even had a short video of the foam falling off. (Somewhat of a novelty way back in 2003.) I watched that video several times. I remember being concerned, but confident that NASA would figure it out. Then when I saw the headline that Columbia didn't land, I remember immediately thinking, "On no! The foam!". I also remember being puzzled that none of the news stories after the crash mentioned the foam for a long time. I've tried to go back and find that news story, but I have never been able to find it.
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  This sort of thing seems to be standard in journalism. For some reason, the articles never seem to ask the obvious questions or make the obvious connections. I've always been so puzzled by this but I guess it's because there's no incentive to speculate.
deleted 7y ago
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_cs2017_ 7y ago
The authors of the slide either lacked the ability to analyze problems, or lacked the ability to communicate their opinions, or were intentionally obscuring their opinions. Which of these is the more likely explanation? I've seen experienced engineers incapable of expressing their thoughts clearly. But I've also seen well-established organizations that encourage hiding your opinions behind a wall of bullshit.
- peteradio 7y ago
  Have you considered the possibility that in some cases it is basically forbidden from expressing opinions. These guys were tasked to conduct and summarize their studies not opine on the decision to be made, that violates separation of duties and an expressed opinion leads to questions of diligence.
  - _cs2017_ 7y ago
    Yes, that's what I meant under "intentionally obscuring their opinions" (for example because of the organizational culture, etc).
outworlder 7y ago
Powerpoint was one of the problems. A much worse problem was NASA's management stepping in to block multiple requests for imaging the orbiter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
sopooneo 7y ago
I am not sure if the author and commenters here are specifically condemning Microsoft Powerpoint, or just computerized slide presentations, of which Powerpoint is by far the most common type. Because even if everyone used Apple's "Slides" tool, they could still make a lot of the same mistakes. Even if they drew things out on clear plastic sheets, they could still make the same mistakes. So is it really Powerpoint specifically? Maybe. I'm open to that possibility. But I'm more sympathetic to the idea that Powerpoint has enabled many more people incapable of creating quality presentations to deliver them anyway.
- ericsoderstrom 7y ago
  No, this article is not a criticism of PowerPoint specifically.
ridgeguy 7y ago
>...nine times faster than a fired bullet... I don't think so. A NASA publication [1] gives the SOFI piece impact velocity as about 800 feet/sec. Rifle bullets reach 2.5K - 3K fps muzzle velocity routinely. [1] https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20Site/CAIB/CAIB%20Website/news/FOAMIM~1.PDF https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20S...
- bumby 7y ago
  I assume the author mistakenly took the orbital velocity instead of the delta-V at impact
hughes 7y ago
The speed listed in the introduction is wildly wrong. The foam could not possibly have hit at 28968 km/h - that is the approximate orbital speed of the shuttle. At 82 seconds into flight, the speed is about 700m/s (2500 km/h). Even using that figure would assume that the foam came to a dead stop instantaneously after detaching from the tank. I wouldn't be surprised if the relative speed was only 1/10th of that, putting the speed of the collision around 250km/h, less than 1% of the figure stated in the article.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > The speed listed in the introduction is wildly wrong. The foam could not possibly have hit at 28968 km/h The article said "[a]s the crew rose at 28,968 kilometres per hour the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles". It did not say that it collided with the tiles at 28k km/hr, just that it collided with it during it's acceleration to that speed. So technically it's correct, but I definitely agree that it it's a false implication, likely added for dramatic effect.
  - hughes 7y ago
    In the next sentence the author also says the damage was caused by foam "hitting the wing nine times faster than a fired bullet." A bullet goes about 900m/s, and the "nine times" figure often symbolizes orbital velocity. It's clear that the reference is to the speed of the collision.
dba7dba 7y ago
I heard one possible reason for underestimating the damage was due to the move of a NASA (or the contractor?) lab/facility that dealt with this kind of issues, from California to a cheaper place such as Alabama/Florida(?). The move was done as a cost saving measure. Quite a few of the engineers chose not to relocate with the office. When the space shuttle launched and the image was being reviewed, many of the experienced engineers (who could possibly have predicted it correctly) were no long with the team. I remember reading above bit years ago while reading about the incident.
what-the-grump 7y ago
Not the person that made the powerpoint? Not the team that reviewed it? Was this done by an 10 man team in some tiny start up? I mean seriously.
- system2 7y ago
  Exactly. This article is like one of those BusinessInsider click-baits.
aaron695 7y ago
So Challenger had a 'just so' story involving o-rings and Columbia has a 'just so' story involving powerpoint? Or space travel is hard and people will die?
Proven 7y ago
The app saved 7 billion from watching crap-quality whiteboard and traditional docs, and we're still reading about the 7 triggered ones.
mannykannot 7y ago
This is a rehash of the claim Edward Tufte.made about the Challenger crash, and it is doing the same thing: take something that was, at most, one of the many contributing factors (but the one of most interest to the person making the claim) and exaggerate its significance out of all proportion. It is not a helpful way to present data if the goal is to understand what went wrong in the hope of avoiding making the same mistake in future.
unreal37 7y ago
"Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally." So tacky. Treating human deaths as a punchline to a joke.
therealmarv 7y ago
So do they still use PowerPoint like this?
pontifier 7y ago
What a surprise that it was from Boeing. I don't like them at all.
darkpuma 7y ago
> "It was impossible to tell how much damage this foam had caused hitting the wing nine times faster than a fired bullet." This figure is GROSSLY inaccurate. From: https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20Site/CAIB/CAIB%20Website/news/FOAMIM~1.PDF https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20S... >Eighty-two seconds into STS 107, a sizeable piece of debris struck the left wing of the Columbia. Visual evidence and other sensor data established that the debris came from the bipod ramp area and impacted the wing on the wing leading edge. At this time Columbia was traveling at a speed of about 2300 feet/second (fps) through an altitude of about 65,900 feet. Based on a combination of image analysis and advanced computational methods, the Board determined that a foam projectile with a total weight of 1.67 lb and impact velocity of 775 fps would best represent the debris strike. So somewhere between 775fps and 2300 fps. For reference, slow and heavy 45 ACP bullets start at around 800fps and up. 7.62x39mm (AK-47) bullets are in the neighborhood of 2300fps. The shuttle was moving as fast as a moderately fast rifle bullet, and the foam likely hit at much less than that; something probably a bit under a subsonic pistol bullet. The author is incorrectly assuming that the foam hit the shuttle at orbital velocity, which obviously couldn't be the case because the shuttle was nowhere even close to orbital velocity at the time.
peteradio 7y ago
Actual slide deck. Personally I think the author of this blog is an a-hole to highlight a single slide. https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.p... Particularly interesting is the slide titled "Damage Results From “Crater” Equations Show Significant Tile Damage"
pjtr 7y ago
"there is a huge amount of text, more than 100 words" "PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers" Would technical papers have fewer than 100 words? If people can't be bothered to read 13 slides, what would they do with a technical paper? If people can't be bothered to make their message clear in slides, how would they create a readable technical paper? I don't like presentations that consist of "monotonously reading [bullets] as we read along" either. But what does PowerPoint have to do with this? I've seen such presentations done with trendy web tools instead; they don't change anything. I've also read full technical papers written in LaTeX that didn't manage to get their point through the unclear writing (and vaguely misused technical jargon buzzwords).
- speedplane 7y ago
  > If people can't be bothered to make their message clear in slides, how would they create a readable technical paper? Slides are not the same as or replacements for technical papers. Even by comparing them, you're making the same mistake as these engineers did. Compared to a paper, the downsides of a presentation are that they are typically constrained to just 30-60 minutes, in front of a group of people who may be checking their phones and only be half-engaged. Also, by its very nature, the presenter is speaking, so it's difficult to simultaneously read the slides while listen to the presenter. The upside of a presentation however, is that you can give it to many people at once, and solicit feedback in real-time. Accordingly, presentations like this need to be far tighter than technical papers. There needs to be much more work invested in prioritizing the issues that you discuss, they should take advantage of the advantages of the form (e.g., utilizing the skills of the audience), and minimize the disadvantages (short time-frame, and no monopoly on attention). As a starter, you should never put a single word on a slide that you do not say out-loud. There's nothing worse than putting a block of text on a screen and talking about it. The astute audience members will listen to you while reading the text, and in the process not internalizing either. Most audience members will just have their eyes glaze over and then check their phones. Sadly, engineers are often taught how to write technical papers, but not how to give effective technical presentations.
  - pjtr 7y ago
nablaoperator 7y ago
Ironic, the woman responsible for the catastrophe: "...rather than spending the day just listening to keynotes..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pruxom9-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pruxom9-8
kyberias 7y ago
Kinda weird to even hint that the tool used to communicate would be the cause of the disaster. The same words could have been written in LaTeX and presented with a PostScript viewer running in Linux.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  They very much could. In terms of language, the whole slide deck in question is essentially a scientific paper in PPT form, and scientific papers tend to be typically written in LaTeX.
runciblespoon 7y ago
I seem to remember it differently, what killed seven people was senior management choosing to ignore warnings about ice debris strikes on the wing during launches. On this one, they know ice had struck the wing, they choose not to have ground placed telescopes survey the shuttle, choose to not have the crew do an EVA and choose not have have a rescue shuttle sent up. The title has a nice ring to it all the same.
sytelus 7y ago
TLDR; Engineers had found that there was risk of foam detachment, NASA managers thought that risk was not flagged significant to halt the mission. In retrospect, it's easy to blame decision makers but here's the thing: If I told you that risk of you dying is 1 in 103 if you drive the car today, would you still drive? Relatively risk of fatal accident in Space Shuttle program was 1 in 62.

387 points by newzisgud 7y ago

nyx_ 7y ago

The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007). The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

wycy 7y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I noticed the typo of "hanrd" ("hard") on the re-creation and drew the further conclusion that they weren't even taking the issue seriously enough to pay attention to their slide content. Even though it doesn't change what ultimately happened, it's nice to know that someone was paying at least cursory attention.
- Zanni 7y ago
  Indeed. I missed "hanrd" on my first read through, but "Vaires" and the stray "?" jumped out at me. The original slide is much more readable, and "Flight condition is significantly outside of test database" stands out as almost the conclusion rather than being buried in noise. Talk about a strawman. (Still a bad slide, though.)
jrochkind1 7y ago
Why would someone recreate that slide instead of just using the original? Gah, that's sloppy reporting. Makes me suspect the entire story told, now that you pointed that out.
- bumby 7y ago
  There's other sloppiness here as well, like treating the orbiter velocity as the determining factor (nine times the speed of a bullet...) when the delta-V between the foam and the orbiter is the more pertinent information. The author comes across like they have an axe to grind (maybe rightly so) but should make better efforts at getting technical details right in an article about the perils of miscommunicating technical details
erobbins 7y ago
So if I'm reading this right, the previous testing was done with a 3 cubic inch foam block at 200 ft/sec impact velocity... and the foam ramp was 1900 cubic inches and going 900 feet/sec at impact. This is like saying "shooting someone in the head with a BB gun doesn't kill them, so we think shooting them in the head with a shotgun slug should be fine." What on earth were these people thinking?
ineedasername 7y ago
That same linked page by Edward Tufte (of data visualization fame) has a proposed revised slide that would have more adequately conveyed the risk

supahfly_remix 7y ago

We weren't at the briefing. Surely the briefer could have emphasized these points, rather than just relying on the slide itself to convey the seriousness of the situation. Or, the judgement of the audience to pick up that they hadn't tested for this situation. I like Tufte as much as anyone else, but he's in the business of selling courses.

protomyth 7y ago

No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible. On a side note, the whole first paragraph is just plain insulting to anyone who is making a life or death decision. If that is the attitude of anyone in the meeting, then they shouldn't have that job.

davidmr 7y ago
There’s definitely audio from all those meetings. You can hear the mission manager plow right through the issues with bureaucratic ease. They’ve seen something similar before and even though it was unexplained, because they’ve seen it, they think it’s a known issue. You want to blame her for it and shake her out of it as you hear her say it, but it wasn’t malicious. I believe the mission manager even had a spouse who was an astronaut, so it’s obviously not like they don’t care. I’ve always found it fascinating how organizational structure and pressure can take really brilliant and motivated people and beat them into making such poor decisions. It’s really important to remember that these people are not idiots. It’s literally a room of rocket scientists and space shuttle mission managers. It’s so easy for us all to say here that it was so easy to see it happening and that anyone who didn’t ask the right question was a moron, but these structures take on a life of their own. If I had it to start all over again, studying that would make a fascinating and potentially rewarding career.
- OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying that it was malicious, but it was absolutely negligent. For people with decisional authority, organizational pressure is not an excuse. For people with responsibility, lapsed vigilance is not acceptable. They weren't forced to make a split-second decision, and they weren't fatigued. While there were contributing systemic factors, this was still a mistake to dismiss the information so quickly. They're professionals, not amateurs.

veryworried 7y ago

I thought this was going to be a more direct kill, as in maybe a slide that flashed bright colors very quickly and killed people who got seizures from it.

davidmr 7y ago

As much as I appreciate the sentiment and I never like to miss a chance to pile on PowerPoint, this is really, really missing the point. As the CAIB report makes clear, the PowerPoint slide was a small symptom of the actual problem of a complex organization gradually accepting more and more risk as “in family” simply because unexplained phenomena hadn’t caused serious issues before (while remaining unexplained). The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time.

icelancer 7y ago
> The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time. Agreed. It is a useful document to read for anyone who plans meetings and heavily relies on consensus to see where the problems lay. You need outsiders and first principles thinkers (physicists are good options, as Feynman always demonstrates) to disrupt bureaucratic agreement.
paultopia 7y ago
Yeah, I think this is right. Which doesn't detract from the slide being terrible, but just adds a bit more about why the slide was terrible. Edit: from the summary of chapter 7 of the CAIB report [1]: "organizational barriers which prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion;" http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/CAIB_lowres_chapter7.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/C...

Isamu 7y ago

Tufte makes a good point that the critical information could have been conveyed so much more effectively. If only the managers had been given a better summary! But I think this is a vast over-simplification. Even with a crystal-clear summary of the issues, it doesn't always add up to a clear disaster on your hands. Only in hindsight. The shuttle was an incredibly complex system and there were always issues to examine, to fix, to prioritize, to defer. There is just a lot to regularly weigh.

deleted 7y ago

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pressurefree 7y ago

Perl is still living in their Hamlet fodder world

js2 7y ago

> They rejected the other options I didn’t think there were any options. Indeed the managers didn’t think so. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste... > Throughout the risk assessment process, senior NASA managers were influenced by their belief that nothing could be done even if damage were detected. However the CAIB determined Atlantis could have been used as a rescue vehicle had NASA acted quickly enough. It also put forth a high risk repair procedure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Possible_emergency_procedures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

PopePompus 7y ago
There were a number of things they could have tried. No one of the alternatives (except launching a rescue shuttle) could possibly have turned out worse than the course they chose. Instead of an Apollo-13 style "Failure is not an option" effort, Jon Harpold, then the director of Mission Operations, is reported to have said "You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the thermal protection system. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/columbia-space-shuttle-anniversary-nasa https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/columbia-space...
- Endy 7y ago
  In my life up until now, I'd always believed the best of people and doubly so of NASA. Seeing that, and knowing it's true, makes me believe that there is evil in this world. And that man is part of it. Whoever and whatever forces allowed him to get where he was with opinions like that, needlessly sacrificing the lives of seven people and being satisfied that he'd made the right decision needs to be brought to account, publicly and with no means of secrecy.
  - scott_s 7y ago

kangnkodos 7y ago

During that final Columbia flight, I remember reading a short news story on the internet on the foam falling off. It even had a short video of the foam falling off. (Somewhat of a novelty way back in 2003.) I watched that video several times. I remember being concerned, but confident that NASA would figure it out. Then when I saw the headline that Columbia didn't land, I remember immediately thinking, "On no! The foam!". I also remember being puzzled that none of the news stories after the crash mentioned the foam for a long time. I've tried to go back and find that news story, but I have never been able to find it.

foobarbecue 7y ago
This sort of thing seems to be standard in journalism. For some reason, the articles never seem to ask the obvious questions or make the obvious connections. I've always been so puzzled by this but I guess it's because there's no incentive to speculate.

deleted 7y ago

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_cs2017_ 7y ago

The authors of the slide either lacked the ability to analyze problems, or lacked the ability to communicate their opinions, or were intentionally obscuring their opinions. Which of these is the more likely explanation? I've seen experienced engineers incapable of expressing their thoughts clearly. But I've also seen well-established organizations that encourage hiding your opinions behind a wall of bullshit.

peteradio 7y ago
Have you considered the possibility that in some cases it is basically forbidden from expressing opinions. These guys were tasked to conduct and summarize their studies not opine on the decision to be made, that violates separation of duties and an expressed opinion leads to questions of diligence.
- _cs2017_ 7y ago
  Yes, that's what I meant under "intentionally obscuring their opinions" (for example because of the organizational culture, etc).

outworlder 7y ago

Powerpoint was one of the problems. A much worse problem was NASA's management stepping in to block multiple requests for imaging the orbiter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

sopooneo 7y ago

I am not sure if the author and commenters here are specifically condemning Microsoft Powerpoint, or just computerized slide presentations, of which Powerpoint is by far the most common type. Because even if everyone used Apple's "Slides" tool, they could still make a lot of the same mistakes. Even if they drew things out on clear plastic sheets, they could still make the same mistakes. So is it really Powerpoint specifically? Maybe. I'm open to that possibility. But I'm more sympathetic to the idea that Powerpoint has enabled many more people incapable of creating quality presentations to deliver them anyway.

ericsoderstrom 7y ago
No, this article is not a criticism of PowerPoint specifically.

ridgeguy 7y ago

>...nine times faster than a fired bullet... I don't think so. A NASA publication [1] gives the SOFI piece impact velocity as about 800 feet/sec. Rifle bullets reach 2.5K - 3K fps muzzle velocity routinely. [1] https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20Site/CAIB/CAIB%20Website/news/FOAMIM~1.PDF https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20S...

bumby 7y ago
I assume the author mistakenly took the orbital velocity instead of the delta-V at impact

hughes 7y ago

The speed listed in the introduction is wildly wrong. The foam could not possibly have hit at 28968 km/h - that is the approximate orbital speed of the shuttle. At 82 seconds into flight, the speed is about 700m/s (2500 km/h). Even using that figure would assume that the foam came to a dead stop instantaneously after detaching from the tank. I wouldn't be surprised if the relative speed was only 1/10th of that, putting the speed of the collision around 250km/h, less than 1% of the figure stated in the article.

speedplane 7y ago
> The speed listed in the introduction is wildly wrong. The foam could not possibly have hit at 28968 km/h The article said "[a]s the crew rose at 28,968 kilometres per hour the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles". It did not say that it collided with the tiles at 28k km/hr, just that it collided with it during it's acceleration to that speed. So technically it's correct, but I definitely agree that it it's a false implication, likely added for dramatic effect.
- hughes 7y ago
  In the next sentence the author also says the damage was caused by foam "hitting the wing nine times faster than a fired bullet." A bullet goes about 900m/s, and the "nine times" figure often symbolizes orbital velocity. It's clear that the reference is to the speed of the collision.

dba7dba 7y ago

I heard one possible reason for underestimating the damage was due to the move of a NASA (or the contractor?) lab/facility that dealt with this kind of issues, from California to a cheaper place such as Alabama/Florida(?). The move was done as a cost saving measure. Quite a few of the engineers chose not to relocate with the office. When the space shuttle launched and the image was being reviewed, many of the experienced engineers (who could possibly have predicted it correctly) were no long with the team. I remember reading above bit years ago while reading about the incident.

what-the-grump 7y ago

Not the person that made the powerpoint? Not the team that reviewed it? Was this done by an 10 man team in some tiny start up? I mean seriously.

system2 7y ago
Exactly. This article is like one of those BusinessInsider click-baits.

aaron695 7y ago

So Challenger had a 'just so' story involving o-rings and Columbia has a 'just so' story involving powerpoint? Or space travel is hard and people will die?

Proven 7y ago

The app saved 7 billion from watching crap-quality whiteboard and traditional docs, and we're still reading about the 7 triggered ones.

mannykannot 7y ago

This is a rehash of the claim Edward Tufte.made about the Challenger crash, and it is doing the same thing: take something that was, at most, one of the many contributing factors (but the one of most interest to the person making the claim) and exaggerate its significance out of all proportion. It is not a helpful way to present data if the goal is to understand what went wrong in the hope of avoiding making the same mistake in future.

unreal37 7y ago

"Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally." So tacky. Treating human deaths as a punchline to a joke.

therealmarv 7y ago

So do they still use PowerPoint like this?

pontifier 7y ago

What a surprise that it was from Boeing. I don't like them at all.

darkpuma 7y ago

> "It was impossible to tell how much damage this foam had caused hitting the wing nine times faster than a fired bullet." This figure is GROSSLY inaccurate. From: https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20Site/CAIB/CAIB%20Website/news/FOAMIM~1.PDF https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20S... >Eighty-two seconds into STS 107, a sizeable piece of debris struck the left wing of the Columbia. Visual evidence and other sensor data established that the debris came from the bipod ramp area and impacted the wing on the wing leading edge. At this time Columbia was traveling at a speed of about 2300 feet/second (fps) through an altitude of about 65,900 feet. Based on a combination of image analysis and advanced computational methods, the Board determined that a foam projectile with a total weight of 1.67 lb and impact velocity of 775 fps would best represent the debris strike. So somewhere between 775fps and 2300 fps. For reference, slow and heavy 45 ACP bullets start at around 800fps and up. 7.62x39mm (AK-47) bullets are in the neighborhood of 2300fps. The shuttle was moving as fast as a moderately fast rifle bullet, and the foam likely hit at much less than that; something probably a bit under a subsonic pistol bullet. The author is incorrectly assuming that the foam hit the shuttle at orbital velocity, which obviously couldn't be the case because the shuttle was nowhere even close to orbital velocity at the time.

peteradio 7y ago

Actual slide deck. Personally I think the author of this blog is an a-hole to highlight a single slide. https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.p... Particularly interesting is the slide titled "Damage Results From “Crater” Equations Show Significant Tile Damage"

pjtr 7y ago

"there is a huge amount of text, more than 100 words" "PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers" Would technical papers have fewer than 100 words? If people can't be bothered to read 13 slides, what would they do with a technical paper? If people can't be bothered to make their message clear in slides, how would they create a readable technical paper? I don't like presentations that consist of "monotonously reading [bullets] as we read along" either. But what does PowerPoint have to do with this? I've seen such presentations done with trendy web tools instead; they don't change anything. I've also read full technical papers written in LaTeX that didn't manage to get their point through the unclear writing (and vaguely misused technical jargon buzzwords).

speedplane 7y ago
> If people can't be bothered to make their message clear in slides, how would they create a readable technical paper? Slides are not the same as or replacements for technical papers. Even by comparing them, you're making the same mistake as these engineers did. Compared to a paper, the downsides of a presentation are that they are typically constrained to just 30-60 minutes, in front of a group of people who may be checking their phones and only be half-engaged. Also, by its very nature, the presenter is speaking, so it's difficult to simultaneously read the slides while listen to the presenter. The upside of a presentation however, is that you can give it to many people at once, and solicit feedback in real-time. Accordingly, presentations like this need to be far tighter than technical papers. There needs to be much more work invested in prioritizing the issues that you discuss, they should take advantage of the advantages of the form (e.g., utilizing the skills of the audience), and minimize the disadvantages (short time-frame, and no monopoly on attention). As a starter, you should never put a single word on a slide that you do not say out-loud. There's nothing worse than putting a block of text on a screen and talking about it. The astute audience members will listen to you while reading the text, and in the process not internalizing either. Most audience members will just have their eyes glaze over and then check their phones. Sadly, engineers are often taught how to write technical papers, but not how to give effective technical presentations.
- pjtr 7y ago

nablaoperator 7y ago

Ironic, the woman responsible for the catastrophe: "...rather than spending the day just listening to keynotes..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pruxom9-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pruxom9-8

kyberias 7y ago

Kinda weird to even hint that the tool used to communicate would be the cause of the disaster. The same words could have been written in LaTeX and presented with a PostScript viewer running in Linux.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
They very much could. In terms of language, the whole slide deck in question is essentially a scientific paper in PPT form, and scientific papers tend to be typically written in LaTeX.

runciblespoon 7y ago

I seem to remember it differently, what killed seven people was senior management choosing to ignore warnings about ice debris strikes on the wing during launches. On this one, they know ice had struck the wing, they choose not to have ground placed telescopes survey the shuttle, choose to not have the crew do an EVA and choose not have have a rescue shuttle sent up. The title has a nice ring to it all the same.

sytelus 7y ago

TLDR; Engineers had found that there was risk of foam detachment, NASA managers thought that risk was not flagged significant to halt the mission. In retrospect, it's easy to blame decision makers but here's the thing: If I told you that risk of you dying is 1 in 103 if you drive the car today, would you still drive? Relatively risk of fatal accident in Space Shuttle program was 1 in 62.