Success Breeds Confidence and Fantasy
The Challenger Disaster
Abstract
Could the challenger disaster have been avoided? I once heard a smart man say “Never get to confortable with what you are doing and if you get to confortable change your work”. The challenger disaster was the product of over confidentiality of the engineers working in the project. The problem that the challenger had been a failure of the O-rings in the engine, these O-rings failed to keep gases inside the engine. When the challenger was launched the O-ring failed to keep all the gases inside the engine, the gases started to scape, when the leakage permitted enough gases to escape the fire that the rocket booster has normal from ignition was what made the explosion. The fire of the rocket booster finds its way inside to the engine and made the fuel ignite. They did not have the chance to even know that something was wrong, the rocket exploded. The temperature was not taken into consideration, engineers reported that morning that the temperature of that day was not favorable for the launch; this important detail never got to the knowledge of top management and was ignored completely.
The confidence that the engineers wrongfully gained was because of previous 24 successful launches, the thought that the probabilities for a disaster was almost impossible, they should of kept in mind that the probabilities where 1 over 25 not 24 over 25.When people think they have a problem solved, they often let up; which means they stop making continuous adjustments. Also, managers lost fear of design a problem.
If the appropriate safety guidelines were followed this will probably would never had occur and the life of seven astronauts would not been taken in vain. This is a clear error that could have been prevented if the engineers working in that project have not get to comfortable working in high risk technologies on a day to day basis. In such organizations, these normal
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