Wednesday, September 28, 2011

NASA

After reading Committees, Juries, and Teams, I thought there was a lot of poor communication going on between the two parties. One main point I would like to point out is in the beginning when McCormack is talking to the leader of MMT who is Linda Ham and he is telling her a similar situation that happened 5 years earlier and how there was significant damage and she responds by saying "And I really don't think there is much we can do so its not really a factor during the flight because there is not much we can really do about it." I thought that was a horrible way to handle such a serious situation. 

This leads us to look at how the team is handling the situation. Later in the reading its states that the team started not with an open mind and automatically assumed the shuttle was okay. This was a bad start to solving the problem and it should have been thought through more. The next mistake is during a conference call and McCormack's line fades in and out causing Ham and Schomburg to misunderstand what he is trying to say. Words get mixed up and the two took it as "No burn-through, means no catastrophic damage." So, in other words if the attitudes of the leaders would have been different and communication was clear the problem could have been solved.