The Challenger disaster of 1986 was a shock felt around the country. During liftoff, the shuttle exploded, creating a fireball in the sky. The seven astronauts on board were killed and the shuttle was obliterated. Immediately after the catastrophe, blame was spread to various people who were in charge of creating the shuttle and the parts of the shuttle itself. The Presidential Commission was decisive in blaming the disaster on a faulty O-ring, used to connect the pieces of the craft. On the other hand, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, in The Golem at Large, believe that blame cannot be isolated to any person or reason of failure. Space flight is a Golem, meaning that it is very powerful but also inherently risky. Collins and Pinch objectively examine what actually happened during the creation and testing of the shuttle and they believe that it was the organizational culture of NASA and Morton Thiokol that allowed the disaster.
Collins and Pinch draw a distinctive line between what actually happened and the public’s perspective on what happened. The public had a compulsive desire to create a moral lesson and provide heroes and villains. Many people misconstrued this as a conflict between the knowledgeable engineers and the greedy management. The public believed that NASA and Thiokol’s managers were ignorant to the engineering, but this is not true, since they were all engineers before their promotion to management. The authors stress the phrase “after the event” to show that hindsight bias is contributing to the public’s view on what actually happened (Collins 32). The physicist, Richard Feynman, awed the public with a demonstration of putting rubber, the material of the O-ring, in icy water. This caused the rubber to become stiff, making it lose its resiliency (32). Feynman gave such a simplistic reason as to why the shuttle crashed, understating all of the complexities of building a shuttle. The engineers did, in fact, know that cold temperatures would hinder...