Challenger Shuttle Disaster

On 28th January 1986, the whole world focused on the Challenger shuttle project, which was an evolution of carrying the first person into space. However, after 73 seconds into the flight, the Challenger was ripped apart above Cape Canaveral in Florida. As a result, the launch of this shuttle exploded and killed seven crew members inside the shuttle. The President initiated a Commission to identify the causes of this shuttle disaster. One technical cause was the O-ring seals in the aft field of the right Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) that has failed due to faulty design of the SRB and insufficient low temperature. The failure of O-ring allowed hot combustion gases to leak from the booster and burn through the external fuel tank, causing the Challenger

Vaughan (1996) argues that organizational culture and the pressure of shuttle launch at NASA and Morton Thiokol leaded this disaster. It indicates the deviations of the launching of the shuttle were normalized, resulting the managers did not report that important information to their top manager. Also, the managers at Morton Thiokol wanted to compete with their rivals. Thus the engineers remained those faulty designs to launch the shuttle, under the pressure of “change is bad” organizational culture. By analyzing this corporate culture, Vaughan’s explanation suggests different management levels have responsibilities for this accident. The Challenger accident was inevitable due to the culture of “change is bad” was ingrained in the human resources management in

As possible causes of this shuttle disaster are identified, NASA also needs to come up solutions to solve these issues such as improvement on communication between different management levels.
• Do: Do changes the designed to solve identified problems. In NASA management, “change is bad” culture is a significant issue that causes this disaster. When changes are required, correction rather than redesign (Vaughan 1996) occurred.
• Check: Check any changes achieve the desired goals or not. Moreover, NASA management should continue checking key activities to ensure the quality delivered by the project.
• Act: If the changes work, NASA management needs to implement that change. Also, Act involves people who may benefit from that change.

When the circle is completed and the problem is solved, it allows NASA management to return to Plan step to identify other potential