Space Program Post-Mortems
NASA's accident boards wrote some of the most honest documents in government. Read them in sequence.
8 documents · 1967–2011 · 1 issuers
Spaceflight failures are investigated with unusual rigor, and the reports rhyme: schedule pressure, normalized anomalies, and engineers who knew. This trail runs from the Apollo 1 fire to Columbia, with a stop for a mirror and a falling station.
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1967: three astronauts lost on the pad.
- 1967 QA-0038NASA · Report
Report of the Apollo 204 Review Board (Apollo 1 fire)
The investigation of the January 1967 launch-pad fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in a pure-oxygen cabin full of flammable material.
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1970: a thermostat, a voltage change and a tank damaged long before launch.
- 1970 QA-0040NASA · Report
Report of Apollo 13 Review Board
The board's reconstruction of how an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon in April 1970.
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1979: steering a dead station home.
- 1979 QA-0045NASA · Study
Skylab is falling: strategies for reentry
A 1979 conference paper on options for controlling the reentry of the abandoned Skylab station, written as solar activity dragged it down faster than planned.
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Context: how the Shuttle was compromised before it flew.
- 1999 QA-0046NASA · Official history
The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA's Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle (SP-4221)
T. A. Heppenheimer's official history of how the Shuttle's design was squeezed by Air Force requirements, OMB budget caps and political compromises in the early 1970s.
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1986: 'nature cannot be fooled.'
- 1986 QA-0037NASA · Report
Rogers Commission, Appendix F: Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle (Richard Feynman)
Richard Feynman's dissent, attached to the Challenger accident report after he threatened to remove his name.
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1990: the wrong mirror.
- 1990 QA-0042NASA · Report
The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report
The investigation into why the $1.5 billion telescope launched with a primary mirror ground to the wrong shape.
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2003: Columbia, and the evidence behind the conclusions.
- 2003 QA-0047NASA · Report
Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Volume II (technical appendices)
The appendix volume behind the headline CAIB report: the technical analyses of the foam strike, debris reconstruction and NASA's organizational failures that doomed Columbia in February 2003.
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NASA's internal distillation of fifty years of failure.
- 2011 QA-0130NASA · Study
NASA: Lessons Learned from Fifty Years of Observing Hardware and Human Behavior (2011)
An internal NASA compilation distilling five decades of hardware failures and the human behavior around them, written for engineers rather than the public.
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