Introduction Organizational Aspects of the Columbia Disaster

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in a disaster that killed its crew. When Columbia began its descent, only a handful of NASA engineers were worried that the shuttle and its crew might be in danger. Minutes later, a routine scientific mission became a nonroutine disaster. 

Although the CAB s comprehensive report raised important questions and offered answers to some of these questions, it also left many major questions imanswered. 

This book enlists a diverse group of experts to review the Columbia disaster and to extract organizational lessons from it. Thanks to the documentation compiled by the CAIB, as well as other NASA studies, this endeavor involves a rich and multifaceted exploration of a real organization. Because disasters are (thankfully) very unusual, we need to use multiple observers, interpretations, and evaluation criteria to experience history more richly (March et al., 1991). Some contributors to this book draw conclusions very different from the CAIB s. 

As the CAIB concluded, the accident did not have simple and isolated causes. There were many contributing factors, ranging from the environment, to NASA s histoiy, policy and technology, to organizational structures and processes and the behaviors of individual employees and managers. The breadth and complexity of these factors call for a research inquiry that examines both specific factors and their combined effects. The unfortunate precedent of the Challenger disaster in 1986 provides an opportunity to compare two well-documented accidents and consider how NASA developed over time. 

This book is very unusual in the field of organization studies because it is a collaborative effort to dissect a decision-making situation from many perspectives. The nearest forerunners are probably Allison and Zelikow s (1999) book on the Cuban missile crisis and Moss and Sills et al. s (1981) book about the accident at Three Mile Island, which also used multiple lenses to interpret single chronologies of events. Overall, there are almost no examples of organizational research that bring 

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