umesh + D + R03

The first page of reading 03 tells the complete story of how the space shuttle challenger accident happened. How the O-rings were leaked and a torch burned completely making the shuttle exploded taking life of 7 innocent astronauts and huge loss of hard work and resources in fraction of second.

So what went wrong in the mission? What decisions lead to the shuttle carry on cold chilly weather of 26 degree, even the engineers had opposed launching the challenger, making strong concern that the O-rings would not work during such cold weather. Reading the second page, the engineers had put 13 charts faxed to NASA and long hours of debate between engineers and managers had been done earlier evening before launching of shuttle. It somehow shows that there were under certain pressure that the space shuttle should be launched, may be due to huge media publicity, or may be due to prestige issues, or may be political issue.

The reading outlines the basic fault line that the illustration or graphic were inconvincible that O-rings would fail in extreme cold weather. This may be true up to certain level. But there are other theories which can be viewed in different perspective, as sociological, management, scientific or maybe there were tug of war between engineers and administrator.

Whole idea of reading is what would have been done to illustrate the case more strong of O-ring not suitable to use during extreme weather. The engineers should have presented their ideas clearly linking all the information in one solid presentation rather producing and sending many charts.

At the end of the reading there is experiment, the clamped O-ring placed in a transparent glass of ice and other clamped O-ring placed in water. This experiment has advantage of controlled methods and comparison of O-ring properties in ice state condition and normal condition. It visually explain and reinforce its findings how it is more convincing to tell the story. So, the charts should be more compelling to story.

The video session was interesting one how the air traffic movements flow all along the day, illustrating different time-series of the country and compare east coastal activity to west coast activity. Next was the 10, how one’s imagination increases to millions of km far away and sees from universe and millions of light year distance away and zooms back to 10’x10’ square normal picnicking site. It would be more interesting, further zooming to microscopic level of 10 x 10 nano mm scale. These videos tell different views to see the truth in graphical way.