![]() Moreover, this mission was a yawn-a low-priority “science” flight forced onto NASA by Congress and postponed for two years because of a more pressing schedule of construction deliveries to the International Space Station. ![]() But in fairness to those whose reputations have now been sacrificed, seventeen years and eighty-nine shuttle flights had passed since the Challenger explosion, and within the agency a new generation had risen that was smart, perhaps, but also unwise-confined by NASA’s walls and routines, and vulnerable to the self-satisfaction that inevitably had set in. It was the responsibility of NASA’s managers to hear those suspicions, and from top to bottom they failed. ![]() Space flight is known to be a risky business, but during the minutes before dawn last February 1, as the doomed shuttle Columbia began to descend into the upper atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, only a handful of people-a few engineers deep inside of NASA-worried that the vehicle and its seven souls might actually come to grief. ![]()
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