Episode details
World Service,1 min
Series Success and Failure in Medicine
How conforming to the rules failed NASA’s Challenger
The Truth About...Available for over a year
Diane Vaughan talks about why NASA flew the Challenger Shuttle without realising there was a serious risk of catastrophic failure – something she coined in psychological literature as the ‘normalisation of deviance’. (Photo: US space shuttle Challenger lifts off 28 January 1986 from a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, 72 seconds before its explosion killing its crew of seven. Credit: BOB PEARSON/AFP/Getty Images)
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