Clive Thompson: “NASA, [...] had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle.”
Before you read into that quote any argument that a reliance on PowerPoint caused the broken foam piece from the Columbia to go unnoticed, be sure to read this article on why the Columbia disaster happened to get a more nuanced view. It was the result of an organizational mess at NASA. A sampling of the organizational difficulties, as written by William Langewiesche:
[The astronauts] had been told nothing of the foam strike. Down in Houston, the flight controllers at Mission Control were aware of it, and they knew that the previous day Linda Ham had canceled the request for Air Force photographs. Confident that the issue would be satisfactorily resolved by the shuttle managers, they decided nonetheless to inform the flight crew by e-mail—if only because certain reporters at the Florida launch site had heard of it, and might ask questions at an upcoming press conference, a Public Affairs Office, or PAO, event. The e-mail was written by one of the lead flight controllers, in the standard, overly upbeat style. [...]
[The email was] a small example of a long-standing pattern of something like information-hoarding that was instinctive and a matter as much of style as of intent: the astronauts had been told of the strike, but almost as if they were children who didn't need to be involved in the grown-up conversation. Two days later, when Rick Husband answered the e-mail, he wrote, "Thanks a million!" and "Thanks for the great work!" and after making a little joke, that "Main Wing" could sound like a Chinese name, he signed off with an e-mail smile—:). He made no mention of the foam strike at all. And with that, as we now know, the crew's last chance for survival faded away.
It was a series of errors—which included the PowerPoint presentation—and an organizational culture that caused the space shuttle to burn up, and not only the ineffective use of a software package.
From a MeFi comment: “This article is not just useless, but offensive in that it implies that the NASA engineers responsible for indecision and poor response seek to use everything they can find, including their presentation software, as a scapegoat for a tragedy that cost lives, money, and ultimately set back the United States space program by years.”
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