The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the "comments" on his site here[0].

See also the article that he has re-posted under the "comments" section on his page on the matter[1].

[0]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/new-edition-of-the-cogn... [1]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/

If you haven't read it, I highly suggest you read Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report:

https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

The words "a safety factor of three" will live with me for every day of my life.

> the few page grabs

The full report (2003 edition, low-res) is available on ResearchGate. It appears to be a lawful copy, uploaded by the author himself. Fascinating reading, indeed.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/208575160_The_Cogni...

That link is the chapter "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" from Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence, and it does mention Boeing's slides in the Columbia incident, but the main work that the author of this blog post cribbed (and failed to grasp) is a more detailed essay by Tufte called "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports".

<https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/powerpoint-does-rocket-...>

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."