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“History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
— Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
The cover of Diane Vaughan’s landmark book, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, includes one of the most indelible images from the tragedy: the warped contrails of exhaust connected to the main plume of an incinerated external tank.
The image captures a moment so visceral that anyone familiar with the accident recalls its immediate reverberations, from the live television coverage that reached into schools to the president’s address to the nation that evening. Even the investigation produced subsequent moments that have gone on to persist in our collective memory, such as Richard Feynman’s ice water demonstration. Less indelible are the more analytical reference frames that—to a NASA audience—are just as intimately tied to the mishap: normalization of deviance, organizational silence, and groupthink, just to name a few.
These analytical lenses are indispensable tools for evaluating evidence. They are also the tools that often receive only a shallow, passing mention in more popular accounts of the tragedy when recounted in trade books, news articles, and documentary films. The relative ease of rebroadcasting historical footage combined with rich details about the lives and personalities of the people who were involved only reinforce the kinds of storytelling that focus on human drama. It’s easy to glorify the person speaking up at the last minute as an unsung hero or to demonize the manager expressing incredulity in the face of evidence that only became understood in hindsight. The danger of telling shallow stories, no matter how emotionally gripping they may be, is that it becomes too easy to say that the same thing happens later on—that history repeats itself.
But history does rhyme. The Challenger disaster followed the Apollo 1 fire, and in 2003, the Columbia accident became NASA’s third prominent mishap. All three events necessitated investigations, each with its own context and final report presenting evidence and findings. All three events resulted in significant organizational changes. And all three events were followed by subsequent periods in NASA history that witnessed historic achievements—alongside sobering reminders of how challenging spaceflight is: including the near-disasters of Apollo 13 and foam striking Discovery during the launch of the post-Columbia Return to Flight mission, STS-114.
The media landscape has undergone significant shifts over these 60 years, too. There is a stark contrast between the reporting on the Apollo 1 fire and the live TV coverage of Challenger’s destruction. Columbia occurred in a media environment much more like Challenger compared to our current world where multiple perspectives can be shared nearly instantaneously via social media. Moments of history captured in real time will continue to go viral and indelible images will emerge and shape our collective memory. As this happens, it is important to remember that the impulses and the stories that captivate us often obscure the underlying dynamics.
Impersonal forces are not the whole story. We cannot discount the influence of decisive leadership, nor should we explain away events as mere waves in some systemic, structural flood. When you hear a story told through the lens of a single narrative, take a moment to reflect. The whole story is never fully recoverable, but we will always have the kaleidoscopic fragments to combine into meaning.
James Anderson
NASA History Office
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