William Langewiesche on the opponents of manned space flights: “They question the effect on the national psyche of successive accidents, debunk NASA's orbital science, and describe the ultra-expensive International Space Station as hardly more than an artificial destination for an ill-conceived spaceship with nowhere else to go. They are right about all that. While they are at it, they juxtapose the human-space-flight budget (currently about $6 billion annually) with underfunded research on Earth (for example, in oceanography and clean energy), and they point to the history of absurd cost overruns in both the shuttle and the space-station programs; NASA's manipulation of budget figures; and its well-demonstrated managerial incompetence. Again, these are all valid arguments. But the critics here are not merely noting the problems in human space flight; they are setting up a straw man—the shuttle—in order to knock a much larger thing down. An honest national debate would demand more.”
NASA
Don Normon on Edward Tufte: “His famous denunciation of the NASA slides, where he points out that critical information was buried, is not a denunciation of PowerPoint, as he claims. The point was buried because the presenters did not think it important. They were wrong, but it is always easier to find blame in hindsight than with foresight. The slides matched their understanding of the importance of the issues.”
See also: the Columbia disaster was a result of an organization mess at NASA, not Powerpoint.
Aside from the above, it's interesting to see that Don Norman is described as “a strong advocate of user-centered design” when the page on which his interview appears does not have a meaningful title and uses Javascript links. Guess Norman didn't stick around long enough to give the site of the publication that interviewed him a once-over.
Clive Thompson: “NASA, [...] had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle.”
Before you read into that quote any argument that a reliance on PowerPoint caused the broken foam piece from the Columbia to go unnoticed, be sure to read this article on why the Columbia disaster happened to get a more nuanced view. It was the result of an organizational mess at NASA. A sampling of the organizational difficulties, as written by William Langewiesche:
[The astronauts] had been told nothing of the foam strike. Down in Houston, the flight controllers at Mission Control were aware of it, and they knew that the previous day Linda Ham had canceled the request for Air Force photographs. Confident that the issue would be satisfactorily resolved by the shuttle managers, they decided nonetheless to inform the flight crew by e-mail—if only because certain reporters at the Florida launch site had heard of it, and might ask questions at an upcoming press conference, a Public Affairs Office, or PAO, event. The e-mail was written by one of the lead flight controllers, in the standard, overly upbeat style. [...]
[The email was] a small example of a long-standing pattern of something like information-hoarding that was instinctive and a matter as much of style as of intent: the astronauts had been told of the strike, but almost as if they were children who didn't need to be involved in the grown-up conversation. Two days later, when Rick Husband answered the e-mail, he wrote, "Thanks a million!" and "Thanks for the great work!" and after making a little joke, that "Main Wing" could sound like a Chinese name, he signed off with an e-mail smile—:). He made no mention of the foam strike at all. And with that, as we now know, the crew's last chance for survival faded away.
It was a series of errors—which included the PowerPoint presentation—and an organizational culture that caused the space shuttle to burn up, and not only the ineffective use of a software package.
From a MeFi comment: “This article is not just useless, but offensive in that it implies that the NASA engineers responsible for indecision and poor response seek to use everything they can find, including their presentation software, as a scapegoat for a tragedy that cost lives, money, and ultimately set back the United States space program by years.”
There's a good interview with William Langewiesche of The Atlantic Monthly by The Atlantic Monthly. Christopher Hitchens aside, Langewiesche is probably my favourite writer of short non-fiction at the moment. The interview is about the subject of his latest article for the magazine—unfortunately not a available online which is available online [via peterme.com]—about the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, and article I can recommend. If NASA or even bureaucratic politics is your thing, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the article. (Your public library probably has a copy of the magazine. It's in the November issue.)
From the interview:
Q: What is it about NASA that discourages dissent?
A: That's a very complicated question. All large organizations do. NASA is astonishingly bureaucratic. I'm sure that people who are in the business of studying the sociology of large organizations would put it in a certain age group; it's sort of a young adult or an adolescent bureaucracy. It's at a certain stage in its development where the initial energies and camaraderie and ability to communicate and sense of mission—all that's disappeared. And it's not yet in the really mature stage, like the U.S. military is right now, where they've been able to work through a lot of these problems. I've been impressed by the Army, specifically, in my dealings with them in Bosnia and Kosovo, by the way communication does work within that organization. I mean, yeah, the Army is famously stupid, and there's the right way and the wrong way and the Army way and all this stuff… but in fact in the larger organization they've worked through a lot of problems. NASA hasn't done that.
George W. Bush: “The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.”
The next paragraph is a lengthy Bible quote, and I'm not a religious man, but Bush and his speechwriters do have a certain ability to make me tear up when his speaches quote Bible verses in times of tragedy. Perhaps understandably, I teared up a lot more when he quoted Psalm 23 in his address to Americans on September 11th.
(In my copy of the Bible, the wording of the verse—Isaiah 40:26—is different than that which his appears in President Bush's speech. Mine reads as follows: “Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by name; by the greatness of his might, and for what he is strong in power, not one is lacking.” It appears my copy of the Good Book is an American Standard Version.)
