Space for improvement at NASA

摘要

Mark Twain once said that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Julianne Mahler, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, makes a case for this observation in her examination of NASA's organizational responses to the losses of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. She asks what NASA learned from the first accident, how that changed it and whether those changes were in effect when the second accident occurred. Given the high-risk nature of human space flight, was NASA a 'learning organization'?