Risk

My big takeway from Claus Jensen’s No Downlink, a 1993 book detailing the Challenger space shuttle disaster, regards risk. Specifically, how different people interpreted the ticking time bomb that was the early-80s space shuttle in terms of the odds that a catastrophic failure, a failure resulting in the death of the crew and destruction of the orbiter, would occur.

These odds of risk were determined by brilliant, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the commission that President Reagan charged with investigating the disaster.


1:100,000

NASA management placed the risk at one in one-hundred-thousand. In other words, if they launched a shuttle launched every day, year after year, for almost three hundred years, such a fatal accident might occur.

1:10,000

The odds that many of the contractors – the companies that constructed the booster rockets, the main fuel tank, the orbiter itself, external systems, etc – were comfortable with.

1:200 or 1:300

The average of the NASA engineers privately polled by Feynman.

1:100

Feynman’s own estimate after his own investigation into the affair.


The launch on Tuesday, January 28, 1986, was the 25th shuttle mission and the 10th flight of the Challenger.