The risks of Discovery....

Friend Ciaran emailed me this morning with an item from the Houston Chronicle about Charles Camarda, the director of engineering on the STS-121 Discovery shuttle team (and a former shuttle crew member) who was removed from the flight decision team because of his support for shuttle workers who raised issues about the upcoming flight. I suspect this is linked to the story of disagreements within the mission team aired last week on NPR (also see here). Although it is a bit vague at the moment, it looks like the disagreement was initially over the idea of acceptable risk, but now has turned into a controversy of personnel decisions. It is also unclear whether Camarda was fired outright or forced the agency to fire him by refusing a transfer that would have effectively removed him from his position. My interest in all this dates back to my co-authored article on the Challenger accident in 1987 and a continuing interest in the organizational dynamics of NASA and similar "high reliability" organizations. We get to watch all this unfold at the launch of Discovery, now set for July 1.... Tags: Charles Camarda, Challenger Accident, NASA, STS-121 Discovery Shuttle, Discovery Shuttle, accountabilitybloke, Mel Dubnick