Reference no: EM132624033

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. Disintegration of the entire vehicle began after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at launch.

The Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by US President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident, found that NASA's decision-making processes were key contributing factors to the accident. NASA managers had known that the contractor Morton Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings since 1977, but failed to address it properly. Donald Kutyna, a member of the Rogers Commission, likened the situation to an airline permitting one of its planes to continue to fly despite evidence that one of its wings was about to fall off.

Investigations also revealed that under continued pressures from top management to maintain the shuttle program schedule, NASA's and Thiokol's middle managers disregarded warnings from their engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning. Instead of calling for a halt to shuttle flights until the O-rings could be redesigned, they were looking for any evidences to treat the problem as an acceptable flight risk.

Thiokol management was influenced by demands from NASA managers that they show it was not safe to launch rather than proving that conditions were safe. It later emerged in the aftermath of the accident that NASA's and Thiokol's managers frequently evaded safety regulations to maintain the launch manifest (schedule). For example, Lawrence Mulloy, manager for the SRB project since 1982, issued and waived launch constraints for six consecutive flights prior to the disaster. Thiokol even went as far as to persuade NASA to declare the O-ring problem as "closed".

Q1: Discuss the different types of decision errors/biases committed by NASA's and Thiokol's managers that led to the disaster? How could these decision errors be avoided?