On January 16, 2003, NASA’s STS-107 mission was underway. The space shuttle Columbia was launched with its seven crew members into low orbit to test the effects of microgravity on the human body. Those seven people never returned to Earth.
The tragedy could have been avoided, but years later the analysis of everything that happened those days has left a terrible conclusion: a presentation of PowerPoint He killed those seven people.
The launch, as said James Thomasseemed to be perfect. The crew began to carry out their task, and were expected to spend 16 days in space performing 80 experiments. Just one day after the mission began, NASA officials realized that something had not gone right.
NASA has a protocol for reviewing the launch with external cameras. After 82 seconds, a piece of spray foam insulation (SOFI) fell off one of the ramps that attached the shuttle to its external fuel tank. As the crew rose at 28,968 kilometers per hour, the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles on the outer edge of the ship’s left wing.
The insulating foam coming off was nothing new: it had happened on the four previous missions and was the reason the cameras were deployed to analyze the launch. The problem is that the blow had occurred in the layer that protected the ship during its re-entry to Earth.
The slides of yore
What did NASA do? Study the possibilities and conclude that there were three: First, the astronauts could have done a spacewalk to check the helmet. Second, NASA could have sent another shuttle to pick up the crew. Third, they could risk simply re-entry.
Those responsible for the mission analyzed the situation with Boeing engineers and created a report in the form of a PowerPoint presentation with 28 slides.
The conclusions revealed something important: it was assumed that the wing tiles could tolerate foam impacts, but that assumption had been made under very particular conditions. The pieces of foam in the tests were 600 times smaller than those that had hit the Columbia. To reflect those details, the engineers created this slide:
At NASA they listened to the explanation, and the engineers believed they had conveyed the risks well. However, NASA believed that the engineers, even without being certain, suggested that there was no damage that would put the lives of the crew in danger.
The option they chose was the third. Columbia would re-enter on February 1, 2003, at 9:16 AM (EST). At 9 that day, Dallas residents saw how the ferry had disintegrated into pieces. The entire crew died.
The investigation into the tragedy revealed that NASA and engineers had had the right information, but had made a bad decision. Edward Tufte, a Yale professor, explained that the problem had been with that damn slide and the way it had been presented.
The title already seemed to indicate that the risk was not particularly high, but the slide also had four cascading points with no detailed explanation of what they meant: interpretation was left to the reader’s discretion.
It was not clear whether the first point (1) was the main one, or if the rest of the points had the same relevance. The different font sizes, strange hierarchy, and text density didn’t help. There were over 100 vague words and adjectives (“sufficient,” “meaningful”), making the slide too open to audience interpretation.
The biggest problem is in the last two points, where it was indicated that what they had tested in the preliminary tests was very different from what had happened. NASA itself indicated in your report after the investigation that they had relied too much on PowerPoint.
The expression ‘death by PowerPoint’ has been used for years to indicate how there are presentations that induce boredom or fatigue due to their information overload. A bad design and the overuse of points to order each data are common problems in this and other similar applications. Unfortunately, in this case that expression became tragically true.
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