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

As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy summary, that's on them.

They should have made it abundantly clear that they had no idea what was going to happen and that loss of the crew and shuttle was a real possibility, but I agree with you.

This slide was presented with a verbal talk track, and anyone who can't handle focusing on the topic because the slide is boring shouldn't be in a position of responsibility.

I can't remember the last time I saw a slide as mangled as the one in the article. It hurts my brain just reading it.

But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it.

As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest.

Being able to express a complex concept in simple terms is an invaluable skill.

We're talking about something a lot more technically sophisticated than a B2B SAAS CRUD web app. PhD level education is considered a prerequisite.

"That's on them" is not acceptable for an engineer when lives are on the line. Part of your job is making people understand what they need to understand. If their lack of understanding means people die, then you need to do your job and figure out how to communicate effectively to the audience you have, not the audience you want.

People with a high school level education should not have been making life and death decisions about the Space Shuttle.

> which it did adequately

What makes you think this, given the subsequent events?

The NASA personnel gambled and it costed 7 lives. Somehow, a powerpoint slide was what caused it? Lol.

It's really terrible. It's basically:

> Everything is fine.

> Stuff is good.

> There's no problem.

> It's all going great.

> Actually, everyone on board is likely to die.

That's a completely unremarkable slide in the aerospace industry. If there was a communication problem, it was with the NASA personnel not being able to operate in their own field.

First of all, is that actually their level of education or are you just making stuff up?

Second, that's irrelevant to my point that the engineer is responsible for communicating, not just figuring stuff out. You cannot say "if you don't get it, that's your problem" when their not getting it means people die.

There really should have been one large bold font slide saying “we have no test data for a piece of foam this size”.

The slide in the OP is a completely standard way of commumicating information in the aerospace industry. If the NASA personnel had problems understanding this slide, then they also had problems understanding virtually every other piece of technical info that was ever communicated to them by a third party. College level reading comprehension means being able to understand nuance, which this slide conveys.

All you're doing here is convincing me that this wasn't a one-off and the aerospace industry has a pervasive problem with communication.

I spent too much if my early career dealing with the consequences of bad decisions made on “good data”. If the presentation was so good why did they come to the wrong conclusions? It became part of my overall thesis that good design invites you to use a thing the proper way even if you failed to read the instructions.

You can’t force someone to think but you can force a lot of people not to, or you can make it difficult to avoid. It’s worth investing the energy into stacking the deck the right way.

The average IQ and level of English proficiency is much higher in aerospace than it is building web apps.

PhD in what though?

Someone didn’t learn about anchoring in business 101.

Isn't this a stronger argument for making sure that things are communicated clearly?

If you want a slide to really hurt your brain search for “Iraq war PowerPoint slide”

The principles of that slide apply to a lot of other circumstances.

There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.

There's a near infinite quantity of technical information to choose from. The purpose is to emphasize what is important, and de-emphasize the unimportant. When I look at that slide, I see 95% utterly irrelevant information, and a teeny tiny note saying, in vague and indirect language, that the impact was 600x worse than any test.

So on the remote chance you're not just trolling: If you're doing anything safety critical, please quit your job before you kill someone. You vastly overestimate human's (including yours) ability to process information. I am being 100% sincere.

My CS undergrad was in the engineering college and so I had a mandatory engineering seminar that was basically "don't get people killed with your work." We covered Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and some other classic failures. I've mostly avoided working on life-critical software so it's not an immediate concern, but that sense of responsibility still stuck with me.

> As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me.

Then you shouldn't be in charge of communicating highly technical subject matter to decision makers, especially if lives are at stake.

The assumption of competency goes both ways. The NASA personnel should have been able to understand a very standard slide in their field, that any college-educated fluent English speaker would have been able to grasp.

Are you saying NASA decision makers graduated from India?

Oh I thought you were talking about NASA and the Columbia disaster. The PowerPoint slide was poorly designed, as it says in the story. The problem was not PowerPoint though. You could summarize it using a PDF, and it will still have the problem if key issues don't grab attention.

The point that seems lost on HN, who evidently are incapable of consuming information that isn't presented in a format designed by Jony Ive himself, is that there's nothing wrong with the format of the slide to the kind of skilled subject matter expert in the aerospace industry that should have been reviewing it on NASA's behalf.

But that's not how it works in most large organizations. The person who has the authority to make the decision is not necessarily an SME in all of the areas they have to make decisions. Rather, they rely on SMEs to do the investigation and then... communicate properly.

Also attended an engineering school. I had to take way too much chem and physics. It was weird.

I can be kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to details so I’ve worked on a couple such projects. It’s sobering, but also I think, “better me than” half a dozen corner cutters at my last two jobs. They could do much worse.

That said, I stayed on a commercial aerospace project about 14 months after I didn’t really want to be there because people kept saying the wrong things in meetings and thinking they sounded right.

For reference, NASA asked the group of aerospace engineers ("rocket scientists") who designed the Space Shuttle to provide them with a technical analysis of the effects of foam impacts, and then subsequently lost the Columbia with all hands because they couldn't exercise more than a high school level of reading comprehension. The engineers presented the facts as they were understood, only stopping short of doing NASA's job for them by deciding to abort reentry.

It wasn't communicated properly as it says in the story. It is typical engineer reaction to question the reading comprehension ability of the readers.

Why are you posting under three different accounts that you've made in the last 2 hours?

If you can't consume the PhD-level analysis that you requested because you only have a high school reading level, despite having been tasked with safely operating what was arguably the most technically complicated piece of technology in existence at the time, then there's really no other excuse for that level of incompetence.

Let's presume you are correct. The Boeing engineers who made this slide were geniuses. The NASA managers consuming it were dullards. If the Boeing engineers were so smart, why didn't they write for their audience?

I am consistently ranked as both one of the best engineers in my company and one of the best communicators. I would never make a slide like that for any audience. It's shit writing for non-engineers and it's shit writing for engineers, too.

You have got to get over whatever this hangup is about "PhD level analysis". That phrase doesn't mean anything.

I'm not arguing that it was a good slide: just extremely average in the context that it was created. If there was a problem with communication, then it was solely on the reader for not being fluent in their own field. The engineers were presenting a nuanced view of their data, which went above the heads of the NASA personnel who were evidently only capable of interpreting a simple "yes or no" answer.

This?

https://armsandinfluence.typepad.com/photos/arms_and_influen...

If it weren't for the millions of lives ruined, that would be hilarious.

Has anyone checked in with Daesh about their Q3 OKRs?

The slide shown here is completely horrendous, even by 2003 standard. I've worked in a field as technical as this one for a long time, and this slide would not pass a review, even with people familiar with the content.

While it does not wash the responsibility of the executives, the engineers have also the responsibility to be clear in their communication

Manifestly the high IQ and English proficiency in aerospace does not extend to the ability of making slides that are not completely a mess

Actually most engineers would complain about the slides shown here. The issue is not the technicality or depth of the content but on the way it is presented and shown. I'm

No PhD I know (several hundreds, in physics) would ever consider this slide remotely acceptable

I wish this was satire. The slide is full of spelling mistakes and all kinds of horrible communication. Even when I know it documents an issue that killed people I still struggle to read it. Only the bottom part hints at anything relevant.

Sure mate, because taking a messy list of confusing statements and turning it into something like: "High risk of failure on re-entry - foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data - test data unfit to support decision as flight condition is significantly outside of test database" requires a PhD in Materials Science.

If you can't effectively communicate how the results (or lack of results) of your research will impact the outcome of a high-stakes space mission you have no business being in that room from the start.

it depends, I noticed that many engineers will input information on a slide following their thought process closely, they rarely think about the audience's perspective, especially if the audience is less technical or not familiar with the domain.

I misremembered it’s the Afghanistan slide https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/apr/29/mcchry...

Putting the fact that you don't actually have any remotely suitable test data buried at the bottom is reasonable??