Putting yourself in the shoes of the managers or engineers in the case (Ron Dittemore, Linda Ham, Don McCormack, Rodney Rocha, Pamela Madera, Calvin Schomburg), consider the following questions?
• What prior assumptions and beliefs shaped the way that you thought and behaved during the Columbia mission?
• What pressures affected your behavior? Where did these pressures originate?
• In what ways did the culture impact your actions?
• If you were in that person’s shoes during the Columbia mission, would you have behaved differently? Why or why not?
a) Rodney Rocha
Rodney Rocha is a NASA engineer and co-chair of Debris Assessment Team (DTS). When possibility of wing damage appeared he requested an additional imagery to obtain more information in order to evaluate the damage. This demonstrates that he actually tried to resolve the issue. However, due to absence of clear organizational responsibilities in NASA those images were never received. Since foam issue was there for years and risk for the flights was estimated as low management decided not to proceed with this request. After learning of management decision Rocha wrote an e-mail there he stated that foam damage could carry grave hazard and have to be addressed. At the same time this e-mail was not send to the management team. Organizational culture at NASA could be described as highly bureaucratic with operations under standard procedures only. Low-end employees like Rocha are afraid to bring any safety-related issues to the management due to delay of the mission. They can be punished for bringing “bad news”. This type of relationship makes it impossible for two-way communication between engineers and managers, which are crucial for decision-making in complex env...
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... Integration, accepted risk of foam problem based on previous observations. She preferred one-way communication and did not pay attention to the specialist (Rocha) opinion for requests for additional imagery.
Culture at NASA was converted over time to a culture that combines bureaucratic, cost efficiency and schedule efficiency of the flights. This culture of production reinforced the decisions to continue flights rather than delay while a thorough hazard analysis was conducted. Managers were so focused on reaching their schedule targets that the foam insulation problem did not induce them to shift their attention to safety. It appears that at NASA managers overrule engineers when the organization was under budget and time pressure. In my opinion, high-level managers should avoid making important decisions based on beliefs and instead rely on specialist’s opinion.
Q1. How did the competitive environment change for John Deere Company between the 1970 and 1980?
Lack of authority and direction at NASA: The agency did not have a permanent administrator for almost four months and there was a high turnover rate among the high level management employees.
Collins and Pinch draw a distinctive line between what actually happened and the public’s perspective on what happened. The public had a compulsive desire to create a moral lesson and provide heroes and villains. Many people misconstrued this as a conflict between the knowledgeable engineers and the greedy management. The public believed that NASA and Thiokol’s managers were ignorant to the engineering, but this is not true, since they were all engineers before their promotion to management. The authors stress the phrase “after the event” to show that hindsight bias is contributing to the public’s view on what actually happened. The physicist, Richard Feynman, awed the public with a demonstration of putting rubber, the material of the O-ring, in icy water. Th...
It’s very hard to say what steps, if any, could have been taken to prevent the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster from occurring. When mankind continues to “push the envelope” in the interest of bettering humanity, there will always be risks. In the manned spaceflight business, we have always had to live with trade-offs. All programs do not carry equal risk nor do they offer the same benefits. The acceptable risk for a given program or operation should be worth the potential benefits to be gained. The goal should be a management system that puts safety first, but not safety at any price. As of Sept 7th, 2003, NASA has ordered extensive factory inspections of wing panels between flights that could add as much as three months to the time it takes to prepare a space shuttle orbiter for launch. NASA does all it can to safely bring its astronauts back to earth, but as stated earlier, risks are expected.
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Safety in the ethics and industry of aerospace technology is of prime importance for preventing tragic malfunctions and crashes. Opposed to automobiles for example, if an airplane breaks down while in mid-flight, it has nowhere to go but down. And sadly it will often go down “hard” and with a high probability of killing people. The Engineering Code of Ethics states first and foremost that, “Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public.” In the aerospace industry, this as well holds very true, both in manufacturing and in air safety itself. Airline safety has recently become a much-debated topic, although arguments over air safety and travel have been going ...
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BP turbulent history can be considered the impalement to the current safety and operational procedures. BP had emphasized personal safety and improvements, but the company had a personal injury rates that accounted for 95% of the injuries related to the oil industry. Following the Gulf oil spill disaster, a number of safety recommendations were endorsed by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. It was then BP realized the future of the company was in its on hands and possibly sealed, if they didn’t address the much needed safety and operational procedures. The organization had a clear understanding
On its first day in orbit NASA engineers came to the conclusion that the foam debris that hit the left wing might have caused severe damage to the shuttle and could prevent it from a safe reentry.
The National Academies Press (2012) NASA’s Strategic Direction and Need for a National Consensus retrieved from http//www.npa.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18248&
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...he firm foresaw the significant probability of harm to firefighters using the training facility and acted to communicate the discovered risks to the government organization awarding them the contract. Communication was essential in persuading the government to address the safety issues because the site met the requirements set forth by law, reducing the perception of risk, and the design choice of replacing jet fuel with liquid propane created the unintended consequence of an increased risk that otherwise may have gone unnoticed if not for the actions of Giffels’ consulting firm. Giffels’ strategy to remain persistent in refusing to complete the contract and highlighting the significant risk his firm discovered proved successful when dealing with a client that at first appeared to have taken a minimalist approach by staying with the minimum requirements of the law.
Growing up it seems every child has a dream at some point to be an astronaut. These children look up every night and see the moon looking back. They want to fly up and explore they lunar surface. This dream would eventually come true for a select group of American astronauts. The dream was not as easy as a grade school child thinks it should be. The United States’ adventure to the moon would come during a chaotic time in human history, the Cold War. The Cold War was a terrifying time for American citizens. Threats of war and nuclear action ran rampant throughout the country and world. A major component to this time frame was space—specifically the race to the moon between The United States and the Soviet Union. President of the United States,
The purpose of this assignment is to explore the profession I hope to be working for in the near future. My task for this assignment was to find an engineer who has a degree in Aerospace Engineering, which is the degree that I am pursuing. I had to set up an appropriate setting for an interview with that engineer. I also had to arrange interview questions which consists of their career information’s, requirement skills, and advices that would help me get prepare to work in the field of Aerospace Engineering. I found Gonzalo Mendoza who is an Engineer Specialist in Aero sciences for CESSNA Aircraft Company. Mr. Mendoza graduated with his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Aerospace Engineering at San José State University (SJSU) in the Spring of 1997. I chose to interview Mr. Mendoza because other than his position at CESSNA, he was a student at SJSU which is beneficial for me because it would be the best time to ask some advice with senior project designs as well as getting some feedback on courses that are relevant to his job. The interview took place at E-114C at SJSU on Friday February 24, 2012. Prior to the interview, I reminded Mr. Mendoza that he does not need to answer questions with information’s that are confidential. The following questions and answers were recorded during the interview.