Engineering management, engineering reasoning, and engineering education: lessons from the Space Shuttle Challenger

The author analyzes published and archival testimony of participants in the decision to launch the Challenger, and extracts novel lessons for engineering training and engineering managers from the decision process. The professional weakness pointed to is either curricular or instructional: a gap in the education of engineers. Staff engineers and engineering managers arguing for and against the launch were unable to frame basic questions of covariation among field variables, and thus to see the relevance of field data routinely gathered. Simple analyses of field data available to both Morton-Thiokol and NASA to launch time and a year beforehand are presented to show that the arguments against launching at cold temperatures could have been quantified to the point of predicting degrees of component failure beyond those held by decision participants to be safe.<>