Amy Edmondson
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Amy Edmondson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, yes, and in this case,
Unlike the even more famous Challenger incident, no one had any worries leading up to the launch, which was January 16, 2003.
But on January 17, the day after the launch, an engineer named Rodney Rocco was looking at the launch video, and he saw just a grainy speck on the screen.
that bothered him, because he thought that grainy speck might be a foam strike.
And the very fact that... He couldn't really make out what it was, but the very fact that he could see a speck at all suggested to him that the chunk, if it were a foam strike, it might be big enough to do real damage rather than just create a nuisance and a maintenance problem.
And so that worried him.
Now, that was about 15 days before re-entry, so...
Theoretically, NASA had 15 days to kind of figure out whether there had been a real problem, and if so, whether there was an alternate plan to the simple reentry that was part of the schedule.
In other words, could they find out A, is there really a problem, and then B, if so, is there anything we could do about it in that 15-day window?
But unfortunately, Rocha and his immediate colleagues
were never able to get senior managers at NASA to take the problem seriously, to really believe that there was a problem.
Exactly.
So unfortunately,
People at NASA had learned to equate the foam strikes that did happen with just maintenance.
They're not a safety risk, but they had had so many of these little tiny foam strikes that they didn't think it was worth looking into.
It's completely understandable.
Their own experience had taught them that it was fine.
I have enormous empathy for everyone who was a part of that shuttle program who believed it to be fine because I'm that way too.
I'm a fallible human being who overly trusts my...
prior experience and often fails to be curious enough about, well, maybe this one's different.
Showing 121–140 of 344 · page 7 of 18
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