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Essay On Challenger Disaster

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Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster On 28 January 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger on Mission 51 - L broke apart 73 seconds after the launch and it resulted in the death of all seven crew members on board. The challenger started to break into parts after the failure of right Solid Rocket Booster 's O-ring seal. After that, the external tank was destroyed by the explosive burn of hydrogen and oxygen propellants, and Aerodynamic forces completely broke up the orbiter. On the other hand, the crew compartment and other vehicle components were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean after the extended search and operation. After the disaster, United States President Ronald Reagan appointed a special commission in order to investigate the accident. Main factors …show more content…

Again based on the GEMS ( Reason, 1990), this situation may be arised from tendency to haste - not giving adequate consideration to alternative strategies- and disregarding contradictory evidence -despite exceptionally low temperature evidence, they ignored it in favour of evidence that there were no correlation found between low temperature and blowby gasses which eroded the O-rings in previous mission. Conclusion and Advice After the disaster, as Presidental Commission found that organizational culture and decision making process seems as the key factor that played role in the disaster. Moreover, political forces, pressure of economic considerations, production pressures and managerial wrongdoings were other factors that led to unsafe decisions by getting rid of professional and technical safety culture and eventually causing the disaster. In order to prevent the future errors like this disaster, the most required advice may be the fixing the communication failures in hierarchical system of the

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