Yeah, it's clear that the slide was poorly written, but it seems very odd to put the lion's share of the blame on the people who presented accurate information poorly, instead of the people who thought it was okay to merely skim a <150-word slide when seven lives depended on their comprehension.
Why on Earth did they veto even doing a spacewalk to inspect the damage, before concluding it was safe?
I don’t agree. I work in the Danish public sector, which means we handle healthcare related software that could potentially lead to deaths.
Our managers aren’t technical wizards, and especially not in the field of healthcare. They are mostly doctors with a masters in management. Their job is to listen to what everyone has to say, and then make a decision based on that.
Our job is to make sure they don’t miss important points related to subjects they may not fully understand. Burying a “may cause significant damage” on a text-heavy slide like that is simply put poor communication.
It should’ve been the only words on a slide, it should have been in bold red, and, it should have said “if you ignore this, people may die”.
I believe the logical reasoning to be: Powerpoint presentations facilitate filling in the blanks without prompting careful weight and consideration. As a tool it is more likely to influence poor thought and communications structure and muddle high level intake and review of data.
A more correct communications format might be the traditional longer-form report. A main document frames facts, possibly with graphs and other features used to reach the conclusions and explain why different points are salient. An executive summary preface presents the conclusions of skilled individuals and their core reasoning, which lets non-experts reference the larger report for a better understanding and/or ask questions if they are still unclear.
The engineers aren't blameless. They clearly fucked up as well. There is plenty of blame to go around.
But the managers should have carefully read every word that was placed in front of them. They should have asked questions if anything was at all unclear. This was, ultimately, their responsibility and their decision. They chose to rush it, and people died.
And I'm just baffled as to why they didn't send someone out to inspect the damage visually. The Columbia wasn't carrying a remote arm to quickly and safely maneuver an astronaut to the observation site, but the crew were trained and equipped for emergency EVA. It would have been a minor risk, but nothing compared to the danger of reentry failure.
Spacewalks are neither free nor totally safe either. It is possible they calculated that the risk of a spacewalk and the time it would take to do that was worse than attempting re-entry. They were probably wrong, but it's not a free operation.
Only if you look at things deterministically, which is usually the incorrect approach. It was almost certainly wrong. But you are working with incomplete information.
Why on Earth did they veto even doing a spacewalk to inspect the damage, before concluding it was safe?