Case Study on Nasa

Case Study

The space shuttle Challenger

The Challenger disaster was mainly caused by communication failures inside the organization and should have been avoided if all seven barriers of effective communication were applied. These seven barriers being: language, overload, noise, emotion, sensitivity, specialist knowledge, inconsistent messages and gap.

This is listed as a tragedy because of the death of seven on board crewmembers; their death was caused by failure to successful communication. The shuttle was destroyed as a consequence of the failure of one of the O-ring joints in its right solid rocket booster.

The first problem of communication was the gap between the managers and workers, where the message failed to arrive to the managers on time. In the case study this was the happening when engineers from the Marshall Flight center wrote to the manager of the SRB (solid rocket booster) project, George Hardy. One engineer suggested that the joint rotation would cause the secondary O-ring to be useless. However, Hardy did not forward the memos to Thiokol, who was his superior in this project. As a result, the field joints were accepted for flight in 1980.

Other evidence was found that the O-ring erosion, or so-called rust, was present and not reported to senior staff, which is against NASA regulations, and decided to keep the problem within their reporting channels with Thiokol. Professionals would also call this a communication barrier, as Thiokol did not report the erosion problem to senior staff.

As clearly mentioned in the case study, The O-ring dilemma was very serious and that the space shuttle should have been redesigned in order to avoid the accident from happening. Instead the problem was ignored and they're for the O-ring passed the test. This can be once again applied to a barrier, by Thiokol and Marshall. Them being the only ones that knew the failure in the system but still encouraged NASA to accept their project and have it used for the shuttle.

Another barrier of communication shows up towards the end of the case study, which in this case would be the barrier of emotion. "If an individual has a poor working relationship with someone, that individual's feeling may