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

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210 points scapecast | 4 comments | 28 Aug 25 21:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.638s | source
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bigstrat2003 ◴[29 Aug 25 01:47 UTC] No.45059108[source]▶
I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?
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stinkbeetle ◴[29 Aug 25 01:59 UTC] No.45059191[source]▶
Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,

> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

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andrewflnr ◴[29 Aug 25 04:29 UTC] No.45060207[source]▶
But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all. Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.
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1. xp84 ◴[29 Aug 25 05:16 UTC] No.45060476[source]▶
I agree completely. My deck would have been:

Slide 1: 48-point font

  Don't go forward with reentry
Slide 2: 24-point font

  * Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in.

  * Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive

  * Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out
This would have been a great PowerPoint, and I'm not convinced handing them only an academic paper with dozens of pages of facts and figures would have had the effect that my above deck would have had.
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2. andrewflnr ◴[29 Aug 25 05:23 UTC] No.45060517[source]▶
Agree. Though to be honest I still think a paper with an executive summary that said "Don't go forward etc" would have probably been even better. Then the powerpoint slides can be illustrations of how far outside the testing data this is, simulations of possible damage, and other, you know, useful stuff.
3. notahacker ◴[29 Aug 25 14:24 UTC] No.45064549[source]▶
Yeah, a slide like that would have been fine; fundamentally the slide is exactly like an academic paper in that some of the most interesting implications are just banal statements of the numbers in the data and qualifiers. In fact, the slide is much better than the academic paper... it doesn't contain much in the way of irrelevant data and qualifiers.

In practice Tufte and bloggers and commenters are retconning messages engineers not possessing foreknowledge of what was going to happen didn't wish to convey. The slide isn't supposed to say "no reentry" not because engineers don't know how to say no using PowerPoint, but because what the engineers are actually saying by selecting those points for consideration is "damage is theoretically possible but not in our simulations which test data suggests are actually on the conservative side; the test data is only at a very small scale though". If they'd dumbed it down, the slide would have said "it could go wrong but the limited data we've got suggests it won't"

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4. xp84 ◴[30 Aug 25 07:09 UTC] No.45072549[source]▶
I'm basically with you and let's be clear, I know nothing about the domain. But the word "limited" is doing a lot of work in that last sentence. Maybe a diagram showing relative size of the biggest foam chunk they'd tested vs. the size of the actual one would have been useful.