In an effort to explore the unknown vastness of space and get more answers about how the universe was formed, humanity is actively building space shuttles and orbiting the solar system. Building, launching, and maintaining these shuttles requires tremendous effort, financial investment, and safety precautions that can lead to tragedy if ignored. One of perhaps the most famous tragic events related to space exploration was the Challenger disaster of early 1986 (The New York Times, 2014). The Space Shuttle Challenger was an experimental spacecraft from NASA that was qualitatively different from the vehicles of the time and was predicted to deliver needed resources to space orbit regularly, significantly increasing the availability of space exploration, including commercial space exploration. However, during a pilot launch in 1986, on January 28, 73 seconds after launch, the external fuel tank ruptured, causing the entire spacecraft to explode and killing all seven crew members. This paper proposes a close examination of this tragedy in terms of risk assessment, including the use of a risk assessment matrix.
The matrix shown above assesses five different risks that have different probabilities of occurrence and effects on space shuttle launch and operations. These include, in order of probability of occurrence: orbital space debris collision, damage to the O-ring, a conflict between crew members, weather disturbance, and loss of crew communications signal. For some of the presented risks, the probability of occurrence turns out to be intermediate (L/M) because it depends on a specific case and cannot be generalized. However, the risks have been chosen so that only one of them, interpersonal conflict, has an intermediate effect on the shuttle operation; all other risks lead to significant disruptions, up to and including disaster, like the Challenger tragedy.
It is a mistake to think that a low probability of risk occurrence is associated with a lower priority of attention to the problem. The Challenger tragedy, which is almost exceptional and strictly related to a secondary fuel tank O-ring, demonstrated the opposite pattern (The New York Times, 2014). What this means is that attention should be paid first to those risks that may have the highest effect on shuttle performance, but less significant potential problems should not be ignored. As the 1986 case showed, the tragedy might not have happened if NASA management had been effective and listened to the advice of engineers. Management’s lack of literacy and desire to achieve results in spite of apparent safety issues is not an uncommon problem for large companies: for example, Boeing repeated the NASA tragedy in 2018 and 2019 (White, 2020). Consequently, the answer to such threats is to listen carefully to the team that designs and implements flight preparations and to respond to any, even the slightest risk, allowing for accountability and transparency, bypassing tragedies.
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