After reviewing a nuclear industry example,
we are going to now go to another industry,
the space industry.
And we are going to see what happened to the shuttle Columbia.
On February 1, in 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated
while it was reentering Earth's atmosphere,
killing all the crew members.
This was a second disaster for the space shuttle program
after the Challenger in 1986.
During the launch of the last Columbia's mission,
that would have been or was the 28th mission,
a piece of foam insulation broke off from the space shuttle external tank
and struck the left wing of the orbiter.
A few previous shuttle launches had seen damage
ranging from minor to major from foam shedding,
but some engineers, in this case, suspected
that the damage to the Columbia was more serious.
That led that NASA managers limited the investigation,
reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem
even if they had been confirmed.
The crash of the space Columbia happened
when the Columbia was reentering the atmosphere
and disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana,
killing all the seven crew members.
Some engineers, after that, were asked to prove that they could fail
rather than to prove that they could not.
The burden of proof must go to a safe behavior.
What happened there was that the main fuel tank of the ferry
is covered with a thermal insulator.
That thermal insulator is made of foam.
That is designed, sorry, to prevent ice formation
when the tank is filled with the liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
Such ice formation can damage the shuttle if it is detached during the takeoff.
As with the erosion problems of that O-ring
that finally condemned this space shuttle,
NASA management became accustomed to that phenomena,
They had discovered that in other flights.
Specially one just two missions before the Columbia.
As there were no consequences in the previous episodes,
NASA management got accustomed to that.
After that, sociologist Diane Vaughan
called this phenomenon "normalization of deviation"
in a book that she made about the disaster.
So, when Columbia reentered the atmosphere,
the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate and destroy
the internal wing structure, which caused the spacecraft
to become unstable and break apart.
After the disaster, the space shuttle flight operations
were suspended for more than two years,
as they had been after the Challenger disaster.
So the construction of the International Space Station
was put on hold.
The station relied on the Russian Roscosmos State Corporation
for resupply for 29 months, sorry, until the shuttle flights resumed.
So this was a special dangerous disaster
and it did badly because NASA management
got accustomed to failures and they did nothing to solve them
because there was not a problem.