Start-up Nation

It was an incredible feat and a riveting story. But, we asked Riesenfeld, what’s the connection to Israel? Fast-forward to February 1, 2003, he told us, sixteen days into the Columbia mission, when the space shuttle exploded into pieces as it reentered the earth’s atmosphere. We now know that a piece of insulating foam—weighing 1.67 pounds—had broken off the external fuel tank during takeoff. The foam struck the leading edge of the shuttle’s left wing, making a hole that would later allow superheated gases to rip through the wing’s interior.

There were over two weeks of flight time between takeoff—when the foam had first struck the wing—and the explosion. Could something have been done during this window to repair Columbia?

After reading the HBS study, Riesenfeld certainly thought so. He pointed to the handful of midlevel NASA engineers whose voices had gone unheard. As they watched on video monitors during a postlaunch review session, these engineers saw the foam dislodge. They immediately notified NASA’s managers. But they were told that the foam “issue” was nothing new—foam dislodgments had damaged shuttles in previous launches and there had never been an accident. It was just a maintenance problem. Onward.

The engineers tried to push back. This broken piece of foam was “the largest ever,” they said. They requested that U.S. satellites—already in orbit—be dispatched to take additional photos of the punctured wing. Unfortunately, the engineers were overruled again. Management would not even acquiesce to their secondary request to have the astronauts conduct a spacewalk to assess the damage and try to repair it in advance of their return to earth.

NASA had seen foam dislodgments before; since they hadn’t caused problems in the past, they should be treated as routine, management ruled; no further discussion was necessary. The engineers were all but told to go away.

This was the part of the HBS study that Riesenfeld focused on. The study’s authors explained that organizations were structured under one of two models: a standardized model, where routine and systems govern everything, including strict compliance with timelines and budgets, or an experimental model, where every day, every exercise, and every piece of new information is evaluated and debated in a culture that resembles an R&D laboratory.

During the Columbia era, NASA’s culture was one of adherence to routines and standards. Management tried to shoehorn every new piece of data into an inflexible system—what Roberta Wohlstetter, a military intelligence analyst, describes as our “stubborn attachment to existing beliefs.”¹¹ It’s a problem she has encountered in the world of intelligence analysis, too, where there is often a failure of imagination when assessing the behavior of enemies.

NASA’s transformation from the Apollo culture of exploration to the Columbia culture of rigid standardization began in the 1970s, when the space agency requested congressional funding for the new shuttle program. The shuttle had been promoted as a reusable spacecraft that would dramatically reduce the cost of space travel. President Nixon said at the time that the program would “revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” It was projected that the shuttle would conduct an unprecedented fifty missions each year. Former air force secretary Sheila Widnall, who was a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, later said that NASA pitched Columbia as “a 747 that you could simply land and turn around and operate again.”

But as the HBS professors point out, “space travel, much like technological innovation, is a fundamentally experimental endeavor and should be managed that way. Each new flight should be an important test and source of data, rather than a routine application of past practices.” Which is why Riesenfeld directed us to the study. Israeli war-fighting is also an “experimental endeavor,” as we saw in the story of Israel’s handling of the Saggers in 1973. The Israeli military and Israeli start-ups in many ways live by the Apollo culture, he told us.