Rachel+H+R03

It is sad to think that the tragic accident of the Challenger could have been avoided. This was a situation where there was debate on weather or not to launch, there was skepticism, this wasn't just a freak accident that no one saw coming. There were trained professions, Thiokol, the builders of the rocket being flown, who felt it the launch needed to be postponed the next day. They felt so strongly about this that the night before they constructed 13 graphs to prove to NASA administration that the rocket's o-rings were not resilient enough to function properly in cold temperatures. The scientists, however, had a had time communicating this to officials because of several reasons. Yes, their charts were crude and unprofessional but they also failed to display enough data to make the correlation obvious between O-ring distress and temperature to NASA administrators. Thiokol in hindsight made the correct argument, not to launch, but because of their inability to display the evidence in clear, concise charts that their audience could understand they were disregarded and turned down. Perhaps, the media pressures were more threatening than the data presented, it had to have played some role in their decision.

After examining the graphs for myself I am surprised at how poorly they were designed particularly the ones presented to the commission who was investigating the Challenger accident. Chartjunk overpowers the the entire page of most of the charts, the rocket icons are distracting and their arrangement creates many awkward negative shapes. In one of the charts the actual data is obstructed by the placement of the icons, making the SRM numbers hard to distinguish. The shading and crosshatching technique used to identify various levels of O-ring erosion is hard to decipher on the rocket icons because it blends in and doesn't move from lightest to darkest in correlation with least to most damage, color coding would have been a better way to differentiate. I do think in this case that the rocket icons were unnecessary, as they served no real purpose, but that in certain situations icons can help in understanding.