Challenger Shuttle disaster

Sleep deprivation was determined to play a role in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster, the 1986 decision to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger which exploded shortly after takeoff, and numerous deadly commercial airline crashes. 

The results of sleep deprivation have been linked to motor vehicle accidents, major industrial accidents such as the Exxon Valdez, and Three Mile Island, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (2). The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1999 estimated that 56,000 police-reported crashes and 4% of all traffic crash fatalities (1550 cases) involved drowsiness and fatigue as principal causes (3). Sleepiness was a probable cause in about one third of all fatal-to-driver motor vehicle accidents involving commercial truck drivers (4). 

FIGURE 13-2 An unmitigated disaster the horrible explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (Source NASA). 

One of the most effective forms of boron sulfide was the powdered, amorphous form once available from Morton Thiokol. However, commercial supplies of this material were discontinued in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Samples prepared in the laboratory are much less effective and their difficult synthesis and limited reactivity discourages usage. 

About 14 months after the Bhopal disaster, on January 28, 1986, the US space shuttle Challenger exploded and disintegrated 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The entire crew perished six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, the first Teacher in Space. 

The second is the space shuttle Challenger disaster. For Bucciarelli, the focus of this case is the caucus of Morton-Thiokol Inc. (MTl) senior... 

Boisjoly, Roger. (1987). Ethical Decisions - Morton Thiokol and the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, A5M/1, 87-WA/TS-4, pp. 1-13. 

The Chernobyl reactor, like the Titanic, was a technological masterpiece, but both had inherent and serious flaws in their design. Another technologically advanced design that failed disastrously was the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger. Other technological disasters, such as at Bhopal and Seveso, were more related to simple carelessness in design and operation. 

Vaughan (1996) introduced the concept of normalization to deviance in her analysis of the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. She showed how people who work together develop work patterns that make them blind to the consequences of their actions. Small... 

Herndl, C., Fennell, B. A., St Miller, C. (1991). Understanding failures in organizational discourse The accident at Three Mile Island and the Shuttle Challenger disaster. In C. Bazerman J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dyruimics of the professions (pp. 279-305). Madison, WI Wisctmsin University Press. 

The Shuttle Challenger disaster represents a real-world example in which an organization, NASA, allowed the bridge between systems engineering and safety that had existed throughout NASA s history, from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo and on to the early development of the shuttle, to collapse. The Safety Breakdown Theory in this case was the result of several biases that contributed to the failure. As described in Chapter 6, The Glismann Effect—in the form of Pressure bias. Feedback bias, and Availability bias—was obviously present ... 

A company s culture can make or break even a well-designed data collection system. Essential requirements are minimal use of blame, freedom from fear of reprisals, and feedback which indicates that the information being generated is being used to make changes that will be beneficial to everybody. All three factors are vital for the success of a data collection system and are all, to a certain extent, under the control of management. To illustrate the effect of the absence of such factors, here is an extract from the report into the Challenger space shuttle disaster ... 

In 1984, the AMPTE mission launched the first carbon-foil TOF-MS into space, which would have been the second, had the Challenger shuttle disaster not delayed the Ulysses launch until 1991 (Fig. 11.2) [23]. The photons were filtered out by a traditional blackened deflection system, which directed the ions toward the 2 p,g/cm2 thick foil mounted on an 85% transparent grid almost a square centimeter in area. The grid provided the support needed to survive the launch. The foil thickness permitted >2keV/nuc ions to pass through and hit a SSD some 10 cm away. To ensure that the ions made it through the foil and also through the dead layer on the SSD (caused by the upper electrode), the foil and the entire TOF section were floated at 20 kV to post-accelerate the ions. Electrons sputtered off the carbon foil became the start, whereas electrons sputtered off the SSD became the stop pulse for the TOF. 

The Challenger space shuttle disaster (January 1986) was the culmination of a series of occurrences each with its own root cause. 

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