The Columbia Accident

3 Pages 628 Words

The Columbia Accident

This accident and the deaths of the seven member crew could be easily prevented had the leaders and the managers addressed the concerns of their engineers. One of the leadership issues in this case was the fact that the managers were trying to cut the budget and improve efficiency. When I first came across the comment of the previous NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin about how could the budget cuts impact the safety and him referring to it as a “bunch of crap” I was surprised. First, as a leader and a decision maker one of his primary concerns should be the safety of his crew, at least in my opinion, even though it was the responsibility of Shuttle Program Management, and they should work closely to address the safety issues. Second, when we look back into the history we can see that NASA had had the problem of foam strikes before with the Challenger and even witnessing its accident the administrative non-action still occurred due to the external political forces and the internal pressures of meeting the deadline within the organizational structure of NASA. And these were the major factors contributing to the development of the problem. The internal pressures of meeting a certain deadline is not something uncommon in the organizational behavior, however it is solely the responsibility of the management team to make sure that whatever the deadlines are, they are met without putting any staff members at risk. And this case was an excellent example of ignoring the upcoming technical problems and neglecting human lives. An alternative and very desirable solution to the problem could be fixing the breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing. Considering the internal and external pressures this was something possible and could be easily explained by the one of the Shuttle program managers to their superiors who were actually putting the pressure on them. “Blowing the whistle”...