Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster

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Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster happened on February 1st, 2003, which broke on the way back to the Earth. All the astronauts, including two women died in this disaster. The reason why this disaster happened was a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank which damaged the left wing of the shuttle. Even though some engineers of NASA had doubted that the left wing of shuttle had been damaged, the administration staffs restricted to do advanced research. The engineers of NASA found that the foam shedding and debris strikes could not be avoided and solved, even though the previous design of space shuttle required that the external tank was not to shed foam or other debris. However, this situation was not account for security threat and regarded as the acceptable risk. Thus, the launch was given the go-head. Due to the broken left wing which caused the damage of Space Shuttle thermal protection system, hot gases penetrated and destroyed the internal wing structure which led to the disintegrate of the shuttle immediately over the area of south Dallas. Ignore the Feedback Control Even though the similar situation happened in the prior mission (in the 13th and 16th mission of Columbia, the foam went undetected as well), the administration department of NASA were getting used to those situation which did not cause the serious damage to the shuttle that led to the disaster of the 28th mission of Columbia. Just like Diane Vaughan explained this phenomenon in her book as “normalization of deviance”. After analysis the disaster of shuttle Columbia, the main control failure which caused this disaster was NASA did not pay their attention on the small changes happen on the shuttle, because they ignored that small changes may accumulate and lead to the irretrievable disaster, just like the Space Shuttle Columbia

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