> I flew to New Orleans within a few days, and called an all hands meeting where I publicly apologized to the foam technicians. They had not caused the loss of Columbia through poor workmanship.
I don't understand that assigning of blame in the first place. Without negligence, why was blame so important? Reasons, explanations, understandings, certainly, but laying that kind of thing on their heads, even if the original assessment was correct, would solve nothing. It's "the beatings will continue until morale improves," leadership-style. And if blame is mandatory...[1]
The idea that events have defined causes is more or less political. We emphasize the causes that benefit us and minimize the ones that hurt us. Only on this basis can we take credit and blame.
I think that taking blame is probably countersignaling in many cases. I also think no one thought they could effectively countersignal in the shuttle disasters, rightly so.
And even if you handled it as gently as possible, would you still not want to go and apologise if you found out you were wrong?
> After 26 months of work, nobody knew how to address that little statement. Of course we had fixed everything. What else could there be? What else could we do? We were exhausted with study, test, redesign. We decided to fly.
!!! Two years after Columbia they almost lost Discovery??
Two years after they lost Challenger they almost lost Atlantis:
> When Gibson saw the damage he thought to himself, "We are going to die"; he and others did not believe that the shuttle would survive reentry. [1]
