The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA by Vaughan Diane

Author:Vaughan, Diane [Vaughan, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780226851785
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

THE EVE OF THE LAUNCH REVISITED

We now return to the eve of the launch. Accounts emphasizing valiant attempts by Thiokol engineers to stop the launch, actions of a few powerful managers who overruled a unanimous engineering position, and managerial failure to pass information about the teleconference to senior NASA administrators, coupled with news of economic strain and production pressure at NASA, led many to suspect that NASA managers had acted as amoral calculators, knowingly violating rules and taking extraordinary risk with human lives in order to keep the shuttle on schedule. However, like the history of decision making, I found that events on the eve of the launch were vastly more complex than the published accounts and media representations of it. From the profusion of information available after the accident, some actions, comments, and actors were brought repeatedly to public attention, finding their way into recorded history. Others, receiving less attention or none, were omitted. The omissions became, for me, details of social context essential for explanation.

By restoring social context in three ways, this chapter challenges conventional interpretations of the eve of the launch. First, the organization of the book places the Challenger launch decision in its proper position as one decision in a decision stream begun many years before. From the early development period of the Space Shuttle through the end of 1985, the SRB work group had consistently defined the SRB joints as an acceptable risk. Behind this determination was a scientific paradigm that established the redundancy of the joint. The belief in redundancy and the scientific paradigm behind it were institutionalized prior to 1986. They were crucial components of the worldview that many decision makers brought to the teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch. Understanding the launch decision rests on knowing this important fact.

Second, the events of that night are resituated in a more detailed chronology. The chapter 1 version was abbreviated—a stereotype I constructed from aspects of the event that were reproduced time and again in posttragedy accounts. Here, the chapter 1 version is repeated in boldface type, juxtaposed against another version that restores voices, actions, and details omitted from nearly all other accounts. Reconstructed in ethnographic thick description, this restoration of the confusion, diverse viewpoints, complexity of the technical issue and engineering arguments, and little-known aspects of interaction is, in itself, stereotype-shattering.

Third, readers are now in a position to restore context. When the tragedy occurred, the public had little knowledge of the complex culture in which the launch decision was made. Understanding the culture, as I discovered in the first year or so of my research, is absolutely essential to understanding what went on. In chapters 3 through 7, readers learned the culture, acquiring new information that now is a part of the frame of reference, or worldview, you bring to the interpretation of the information presented here. You are aware of the culture of production and structural secrecy and how they affected decision making about the SRB joints. You know something

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