The Final Columbia Mission

In the past few class of Intro. to Organizational Comm. I have been on the Organizational Team that has been studying a Harvard Case Study about NASA and "Columbia's Final Mission". From the organizational perspective there were two main things (well maybe a lot but I can’t go into all of them) wrong that lead to the end of Columbia and its passengers.First of all, in the NASA organization was based on a hierarchy in a sense that all the “lowly subjects” were too scared to speak out against any mistakes of their superiors and it the lowly one did speak up, then they were snapped back in line or disregarded by the authorities. So an example would be the foam that would strike the ship at lift off. When someone said it was a problem their opinion, over time, slowly disregarded and nobody cared because nothing happened. So there was a huge portion of communication that could have stalled a lot of heartache. Nevertheless, the small opinion was thought worthless until it was too late.Second, there was the fact that people were too concerned with their reputation that the life of others was not even a part of thought in their mind. An example of this is when, the head Ham wanted to have everything on time and when there was a reported problem she didn’t care because if the mission was stalled she would be looked down upon so she just brushed the inconvenience under the rug.Because was the lack of getting the info. to the right person and who would disregard it and the lack of worry about other people in the organization, these components added to the disaster of the Columbia.