The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
98 comments
·August 28, 2025mintplant
dclowd9901
It's funny how the thankless jobs of quality assurance become so critical so quickly. And I mean that ironically of course.
To folks out there: do the important work, not the glamorous work, and you'll not only sleep well, but you might actually matter as well.
kstrauser
Well, I’m proud of him, too. Thank him for helping us return to the stars.
quacked
This isn't a failure of PowerPoint. I work for NASA and we still use it all the time, and I'll assure anyone that the communication errors are rife regardless of what medium we're working in. The issue is differences in the way that in-the-weeds engineers and managers interpret technical information, which is alluded to in the article but the author still focuses on the bullets and the PowerPoint, as if rewriting similar facts in a technical paper would change everything.
My own colleagues fall victim to this all the time (luckily I do not work in any capacity where someone's life is directly on the line as a result of my work.) Recently, a colleague won an award for helping managers make a decision about a mission parameter, but he was confused because they chose a parameter value he didn't like. His problem is that, like many engineers, he thought that providing the technical context he discovered that led him to his conclusion was as effective as presenting his conclusion. It never is; if you want to be heard by managers, and really understood even by your colleagues, you have to say things up front that come across as overly simple, controversial, and poorly-founded, and then you can reveal your analyses as people question you.
I've seen this over and over again, and I'm starting to think it's a personality trait. Engineers are gossiping among themselves, saying "X will never work". They get to the meeting with the managers and present "30 different analyses showing X is marginally less effective than Y and Z" instead of just throwing up a slide that says "X IS STUPID AND WE SHOULDN'T DO IT." Luckily for me, I'm not a very good engineer, so when I'm along for the ride I generally translate well into Managerese.
jkaptur
PowerPoint actually fine
- bad communication possible in any medium
- pptx in NASA even today!
- issue is managers/SMEs communication differences
- issues with technical papers
- long
- boring
- vs word, excel, pdf...
Manager/SME Differences
- context vs conclusion
- tell a compelling story
- but give away the ending FIRST
- inherent personality differences
- motivations/incentives/mindsets
Learning from disasters
- medium guides message and messenger
- blame tool - binary choice?
- presentation aide vs distributed technical artifact
Questions?
somat
I love it when some company gets one of the engineers to do a demonstration, you know you got an actual engineer because it will be the worst sales pitch you ever received. They will tell you in excruciating detail all the problems with their product. Recognize and cherish these moments for what they are worth, despite the terrible presentation it is infinitely more valuable than yet another sales rat making untenable promises.
It is something to do with that being the engineers actual job, to find and understand the problems with the product. so when talking to a customer, that is what tends to come across, all the problematic stuff. The good stuff that works, not important to them.
wredcoll
I was just reading a great discussion about how "academics use qualifiers as to how confident they are in the information" and you can see similar trends in spaces like hacker news.
But using "uncertain" language seems unconvincing to people outside of these types of cultures.
Also of course the power dynamics.
dclowd9901
Oh yeah, I've certainly seen this before. I'll assess my ability to complete a project under a time frame as "reasonably confident."
In my mind, I'm thinking "so long as a meteor doesn't cause an extinction event," but the manager graciously pushes the target date back a week.
ricksunny
>if you want to be heard... and really understood ... you have to say things up front that come across as overly simple, controversial, and poorly-founded, and then you can reveal your analyses as people question you.
I question your premise. :J
I'm just kidding, that's interesting I'll have to think about applying that. I don't suppose that would translate over to blogging? The fear of course is that one makes a statement and the commentariat thinks the speaker is full of it for not having provided backup instead of questioning. Maybe it's dependent on what type of forum it is.
tgv
>if you want to be heard
It would have been nicer if that had been the first sentence of that (interesting) comment.
mhh__
If nothing else it's quite hard/uncommon to print out a PowerPoint and read it carefully in a quiet room by yourself, I do this with written stuff all the time.
hydrox24
This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.
Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the "comments" on his site here[0].
See also the article that he has re-posted under the "comments" section on his page on the matter[1].
[0]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/new-edition-of-the-cogn... [1]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/
sidewndr46
If you haven't read it, I highly suggest you read Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report:
https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
The words "a safety factor of three" will live with me for every day of my life.
bigstrat2003
I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?
somat
Speaking of chalkboards, next time you have to give a presentation, bring a chalkboard and do your slides in realtime. Something about the visual show, auditory overload, and not least the novelty of the act makes it much more impactful and memorial than "another powerpoint that puts you to sleep"
White boards are... ok... better than powerpoint but still fail to sell it like a chalkboard does. I think it is the noise.
stinkbeetle
Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,
> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
andrewflnr
But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all. Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.
xp84
I agree completely. My deck would have been:
Slide 1: 48-point font
Don't go forward with reentry
* Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in.
* Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive
* Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out
breadwinner
Would it be better if you sent them a PDF document instead? There seems to be an assumption here that if you send the stakeholders a larger volume of information they will take the time to read it. Is that a valid assumption?
mhh__
Memos and reports also ask the author to try to explain things clearly and at length, a PowerPoint, even a technical one is usually figures and bullet points
Jeff bezos iirc speaks at length about this.
recursivecaveat
Yeah, the choice to gloss over the point "our tests are not relevant" was a deliberate one. If it was in a paper you'd have big fancy graphs of the tests and you'd have to do your own work to compare the x axis against a mention of the actual scale in question in another paragraph. It's not as if they started with "Warning: even the 600X smaller bits we tested can damage the wing" and microsoft just kind of spontaneously grew a bunch of random stuff above the fold. It's a kind of chickenshit communication which you can do in any medium. The point they ought to be making is not dense or technical, it is so simple a child could understand.
mhh__
the medium is the message
ChrisMarshallNY
I think Edward Tufte was involved in the investigation on that disaster.
He has a legendary hatred of PowerPoint.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/the-cognitive-style-of-p...
socalgal2
This was an interesting article but it doesn't really provide solutions. I watched a few tech talks teaching a new API. Most slides were split, left side bullet poitns, right side either code or an image. As I was watching I was thinking "isn't this supposed to be almost the worst style"? but I was also thinking "I can't think of any way to do this better". It's an API. It requires examples. And it requires something describing what to concentrate on, what the example or image is showing.
I've been the plenty of great talks with just images, no words. But they fit the type of talk. I'm not sure an API talk would be better without bullet points. If you know of some to reference, please post links.
klaff
Tufte did make specific recommendations that one should prepare a real document that your audience can and should read, and that they would have in front of them during the meeting. I'm not sure how best to translate that to your API example.
like_any_other
What would make the most important point of that slide stand out any more in a "real document" than in a slideshow? If anything, I would expect it to be buried even more - a slide and limited-time presentation forces you to be concise, while in a document there tend to be few limits on length.
I would say the disaster occurred despite PowerPoint, not because of it. It's not clear to me at all why the slide author thought all that text was needed, when it seems to communicate almost nothing. If anything I would blame it on the culture around "real documents", where having more information is treated as better (probably because they serve multiple functions - to educate, but also as a record of activities), even if it makes it bloated and hard to read.
bryanlarsen
A document generally has an abstract at the front and/or a conclusion at the back where the important information goes.
A presentation accompanied by a document can be more easily done with punchy slides because the detail is in the document.
nettlin
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161
I found it surprising that the slide in the article uses Calibri, a typeface that wasn’t publicly available at the time. The original discussion confirms that the slide in the article is a recreation of the original one:
> The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007).
> The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article:
firesteelrain
Take the text and send it to ChatGPT. Then, use this self doubt prompt and you get some alarming results.
https://justin.searls.co/posts/sprinkling-self-doubt-on-chat...
NaOH
A 2008 episode of the PBS NOVA program covers the Columbia disaster. It does not get into the focus of the article posted here, but it does well covering how poorly the situation was handled (along with other things like the broad history of the Shuttle program).
msarrel
Interesting article. Nice to see Tufte quoted. I took his class about the visual display of information. It was very informative.
The_Fox
Tufte also had a lot to say about the Challenger disaster, which predates Powerpoint but not the visual display of information.
Found the chapter here: https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-ch...
userbinator
falling nine times faster than a fired bullet
No, that's not how the physics works. The foam is moving at the same velocity as the shuttle when it breaks off, and had a short time to accelerate(decelerate) before hitting the shuttle.
KiwiJohnno
THANK YOU. I've seen the velocity of the space shuttle quoted as the speed that the foam had when it hit Columbia's wing so many times, and it bugs the crap out of me.
userbinator
If that was the actual impact velocity of the foam, there would not be any doubt about whether the shuttle would survive reentry, that is if it even managed to make it all the way into space.
dang
Related:
Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615114 - March 2022 (197 comments)
Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 - April 2019 (127 comments)
My dad headed up the redesign effort on the Lockheed Martin side to remove the foam PAL ramps (where the chunk of foam that broke off and hit the orbiter came from) from the external tank, as part of return-to-flight after the Columbia disaster. At the time he was the last one left at the company from when they had previously investigated removing those ramps from the design. He told me how he went from basically working on this project off in a corner on his own, to suddenly having millions of dollars in funding and flying all over for wind tunnel tests when it became clear to NASA that return-to-flight couldn't happen without removing the ramps.
I don't think his name has ever come up in all the histories of this—some Lockheed policy about not letting their employees be publicly credited in papers—but he's got an array of internal awards from this time around his desk at home (he's now retired). I've always been proud of him for this.