"And I never knew you read it," Nordstrum said. His brow creased. "That was my first major piece. If recollection serves, we met a month or two after its publication."

"At a Washington cocktail party thrown by one of our mutual acquaintances," Gordian said.

"Coincidence?"

Nordstrum waited.

Gordian didn't respond.

Nordstrum sighed, giving up.

"After Challenger went down, the media struck up the tune that NASA and the space program were finished," he said. "I remember hearing this constant rattle about how an entire generation of children had suffered permanent emotional scarring from having viewed the explosion on television, and innumerable comparisons between that event and JFK's assassination, and predictions that we would never be able to recover or muster the will to go into space again."

"You very strongly attacked that notion."

"Yes, for a whole list of reasons," Nordstrum said. "It allows a terrible accident to be packaged as a neat blend of pop psyche and sensationalism for the nightly news and the Oprah show. It completely discounts human resiliency and says we're compelled to act as we do by external forces that are beyond our control. Maybe worst of all, it assumes failure to be a given, and then relieves us of responsibility by promoting a linear fiction, a simplistic cause-and-effect explanation for that failure. 'Don't blame me, blame my psychological deficits.' In my opinion, nothing could be more misleading and demoralizing."

Gordian looked at him. "You see why I miss having you around, Alex," he said.

Nordstrum smiled a little.

"Lay a soapbox at my feet and that's what you get," he said after a moment. "At any rate, the central point of my article was that blaming Challenger for the loss of public confidence in NASA was getting causes and symptoms totally mixed up. We all grieved for the astronauts who died aboard that spacecraft, but the agency's tarnished reputation after the accident didn't result from a national trauma. It was a consequence of institutional problems that had been developing and compounding for quite a while, and the ugly blame game that erupted when the Rogers Commission, and later the Augustine Report, brought them to light."

"Concluding that NASA's internal bureaucracy had gotten so large there was a total disintegration of authority and decision-making procedures," Gordian said. "Each manager had become lord of his own kingdom, and their feuding had broken down vital lines of communication."

"That's the short version, yes. But it misses too much that's really disturbing. Information about the O-ring weakness and other potential launch hazards was suppressed--consciously, actively suppressed--because those managers were looking out for their own competitive interests to the exclusion of everything else. Funding needs, political pressures, and production deadlines drove agency officials to lower the bar on safety practices. A lot of people were worried about the launch, yet nobody wanted to be the one to stand up and make the decision to scrub. It wasn't that they intended to put the astronauts at increased risk, it was that they'd succumbed to a kind of organizational group-think that conditioned them to see the risks as being less serious than they clearly were. With every launch, they became more like problem gamblers, telling themselves their luck would hold and everything would work out okay. They made their mistakes with their eyes wide open."