I was home today when the mail came, went out to chat with the carrier, and got a handful of election materials, a couple of bills, and this month’s copy of The Atlantic. The lead article, by Langewiesche is about the STS-107 Columbia disaster, and what caused it. He’s doubtless working on a new book, and I’ll get my order into Amazon now; he’s becoming the John McPhee of this era.

The story is sad, since we know how it ends, and depressing, and enraging.

Because Langewiesche personalizes all his stories, we get a hero, and a villain – or a villainess, in this case:

Her style got the best of her on day six of the mission, January 21, when at a recorded MMT meeting, she spoke just a few words too many, much to her later regret.

It was at the end of a report given by a mid-ranking engineer named Don McCormack, who summarized the progress of an ad hoc engineering group, called the Debris Assessment Team, that had been formed at a still lower level to analyze the foam strike. The analysis was being done primarily by Boeing engineers, who had dusted off the soon to be notorious Crater model, primarily to predict damage to the underwing tile. McCormack reported that little was yet resolved, that the quality of the Crater as a predictor was being judged against the known damage on earlier flights, and that some work was being done to explore the options should the analysis conclude that the Columbia had been badly wounded. After a brief exchange, [Linda] Ham cut him short, saying, “And I’m really … I don’t think there is much we can do, so it’s really not a factor during the flight, since there is not much we can do about it.” She was making assumptions, of course, and they were later proved to be completely wrong, but primarily she was just being efficient and moving the meeting along. After the accident, when the transcript and audiotapes emerged, those words were taken out of context to portray Ham as a villainous and almost inhumanly callous person, which she certainly was not. In fact, she was married to an astronaut, and was as concerned as anyone about the safety of the crews.

Or maybe not…

The story was a sad and unnecessary one, involving arrogance, insularity, and bad luck allowed to run unchecked. On the seventh day of the flight, January 22, just as the Air Force began to move on the Kennedy engineers’ back-channel request for photographs [], Linda Ham heard to her surprise that this approach had been made. She immediately telephoned other high-level managers in Houston to see if any of them wanted to issue a formal “requirement” for imagery, and when they informed her that they did not, rather than exploring the question with the Kennedy engineers she simply terminated their request with the Department of Defense. This appears to have been a purely bureaucratic reaction. A NASA liaison then emailed an apology to Air Force personnel, assuring them that the shuttle was in “excellent shape” and explaining that a foam strike was “something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem.” The officer continued, “The one problem that has been identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels.”

There appear to have been other problems. Go great the magazine and read the story for yourself – you’ll understand how it is that large, stultifying bureaucracies, whether in Houston or Sacramento, just seem to be incapable of actually delivering adequate responses to the complex world in which we live.

I feel bad for Linda Ham, who with this book will doubtless be publicly hung with the tragedy.

But if we are going to hang her, let’s at least try and learn something from it.