Don McCormack

Don McCormack is the Debris Assessment Team’s liaison to NASA’s Mission Management Team during the space shuttle Columbia’s STS-107 mission. His role places him between engineers assessing a potentially damaging foam strike and managers deciding what the evidence means. The account makes that position consequential: technical uncertainty reaches the decision-making group, but not with enough detail or force to prompt a serious inquiry.

Role and Context

On January 21, 2003, an hour before the Mission Management Team’s second teleconference since Columbia launched, McCormack received a briefing from the Debris Assessment Team. The DAT included engineers from NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, and had spent much of the preceding five days evaluating the possible consequences of a large piece of foam striking the shuttle’s left wing during ascent. The impact was difficult to assess: launch cameras had not captured a clear image, and a request for pictures of Columbia in orbit had not been approved.

The engineers had therefore estimated the foam’s size and speed and used the Crater algorithm to predict how deeply debris of that size and velocity would penetrate the shuttle’s thermal-protection tiles. Their analysis had not yet produced a conclusion, but they told McCormack there was reason for concern. His task was not simply to pass along a settled technical answer; he was carrying provisional analysis and uncertainty into a management setting that would determine whether the problem merited further attention.

The January 21 Briefing

The foam strike did not come up until two-thirds of the way through the Mission Management Team’s teleconference, after discussion of a jammed camera, scientific experiments, and a leaky water separator. When team leader Linda Ham asked McCormack for an update, he said people were investigating the possible damage and what might be done to fix it. He also noted that a similar strike during mission STS-87, five years earlier, had caused “fairly significant damage.”

But McCormack did not convey the DAT’s stated concern in a way that opened the issue for examination. Ham replied that she did not think much could be done and that the strike was therefore not really a factor during the flight. The meeting moved on. In the book’s account, this exchange shows a pivotal failure of transmission: the engineers’ uncertainty and their reason for concern were available to McCormack, but the MMT did not receive a full account of the possible consequences or the evidence that might bear on them.

Reporting the DAT’s Findings

On January 24, McCormack met again with DAT engineers, by then serving as their unofficial liaison to the MMT, as they presented their foam-strike study. The engineers laid out five possible scenarios and concluded that the shuttle was likely safe, but qualified that assessment sharply. They lacked good information, including the exact location of the impact because the MMT had declined to authorize on-orbit images; the Crater algorithm had been designed for debris hundreds of times smaller than the foam that struck Columbia. Their tools and evidence could not establish that the analysis was reliable.

An hour after the briefing, McCormack summarized the findings to the MMT. He reported the possibility of significant damage, said the thermal analysis did not indicate a potential burn-through, and acknowledged uncertainty about the debris’s size, impact location, and angle. His account included a note of caution, but it did not foreground the limits strongly enough to keep them from being narrowed in discussion. Ham recast the findings as meaning no catastrophic damage and no safety-of-flight issue; the exchange ended without a member asking to see the study or probing how uncertain its analysis was.

Information, Authority, and Significance

McCormack’s position connects two parts of NASA’s decision process: the DAT engineers with specialized knowledge of the impact, and the MMT, whose conclusions governed the response. The engineers’ concerns did not receive a serious hearing within the team, which the account relates to NASA’s hierarchical culture and to meeting practices that gave little room for dissent or independent analysis. McCormack’s reports are central to that chain, but the evidence does not describe him as the sole decision-maker or assign him sole responsibility for the outcome.

His role also illustrates a wider organizational problem: decentralization can preserve expertise and local knowledge, yet those resources are of limited value if the organization cannot aggregate them into a shared judgment. The book’s argument is not that every decision must be centralized, but that information must travel across organizational boundaries and remain open to collective scrutiny. In the Columbia case, the technical analysis reached the meeting; its uncertainty did not become a matter the group seriously investigated.