Space for improvement at NASA

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’? Organizational Learning at NASA doesn’t add to the extensive official record. But the book is a clear and insightful discussion of the factors that contributed to both accidents. Mahler analyses informationprocessing structures, relations with contractors, political and budgetary pressures and organizational culture, including rivalries between NASA field centres. These four factors were cited as contributing causes to the shuttle failures through defects in mission management, safety monitoring and responses to schedule and budget pressures. The book contrasts prescriptions from two organizational theories: ‘normal accident’ and Space for improvement at NASA