On 1 February, 2003, seven scientists were making their way home, having just completed a two-week programme of experiments in

their mobile laboratory. Tragically, just 15 minutes before they were due to arrive, disaster struck: their vehicle exploded in a huge fireball,

killing all seven. You may remember it: the vehicle's name was Columbia, a NASA space shuttle, and it

disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, scattering burning

wreckage over a wide area of the United States. The tragedy halted the shuttle programme for two and a

half years while an investigation into the disaster took place.

Later that year, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board published their

report. It identified the principal cause as something which NASA had noticed during the shuttle's launch on 16 January, and which

they made public on the day following the accident. One minute and 22 seconds after take-off, a piece of insulating foam had separated from

the external fuel tank and collided with the vehicle's left wing. The damage to the wing's thermal protection wasn't apparent during the

Orbiter's mission, but in the heat of re-entry¹ the aluminium airframe structure

progressively melted until the aerodynamic forces caused it and hence the Orbiter to fail catastrophically.

The report went on to list a number of organisational causes and contributory factors for this accident, but one of these was somewhat

unexpected. It blamed NASA's use of the software presentation tool Microsoft PowerPoint.

Peace on Earth

The front page of the accident investigation report shows the crew patch which adorned the orange spacesuits of the seven astronauts

when they proudly lined up for their pre-mission photograph. Each mission has its own identity, and this one was codenamed STS-107. The blue

shuttle-shaped badge has the names of the crew around the edge. These map to the seven stars of the constellation Columba 'the Dove' alongside a representation of our planet, together

symbolising 'peace on Earth'. In the centre is the symbol μg, for microgravity; this was the last shuttle sent purely to perform zero-gravity

scientific experiments. From this point on, these experiments would be conducted at the International Space Station, which shuttle missions

would then service.

The crew was the usual blend of youth and experience. Mission Commander Rick Husband

had piloted the shuttle Discovery in 1999, the mission on which it first docked with the International Space Station. His pilot on STS-107

was Willie McCool, a space rookie, but an outstanding US Navy test pilot. Payload commander

Michael Anderson was among the crew of the shuttle Endeavour when it made a 1998 mission to the Russian space station

Mir. Indian-born scientist Kalpana Chalwa had previously flown in Columbia in 1987, a mission on which she controlled

the shuttle's robotic arm. Other Mission Specialists, both space rookies, were Naval flight surgeons David Brown and Laurel

Clark. The seventh crew member, a Payload Specialist, was the first Israeli in space, fighter pilot Ilan Ramon, a veteran of the

1973 Yom Kippur War.

They weren't the only living creatures aboard the flight. A small menagerie of experimental specimens included American ants and rats, bees from Liechtenstein, Chinese silkworms, Japanese fish and Golden Orb Weaver spiders from Australia. Oh, and some

Dutch air-cleaning bacteria, too.

We are flying some critters on this mission
- Jack Keifenheim, payload mission manager.

We Have a Problem

The success of a shuttle mission is dependent, of course, on a huge team of planners, engineers and support staff. Every last detail of

the schedule is planned and rehearsed ad infinitum. Every foreseeable problem is risk-assessed, and fallback plans are prepared. NASA's

space centres organise, monitor and control each mission with military precision.

When NASA spotted the foam tile strike during the launch, they immediately sent a report and video clip of the incident to engineers at

Boeing, who conducted an assessment of potential impact damage to the wing. Their Debris Assessment Team requested satellite imaging of

the wing, but for some reason, this request wasn't granted. In the absence of pictures, they instead used a computer modelling tool 'Crater' to

predict the damage. It was a complex scenario. How heavy was the tile? With what speed and at what angle did it hit the wing? Which part

of the wing did it hit? What damage would it therefore cause, and so what was the threat to Columbia during re-entry?

On 24 January, the team presented its findings. Had NASA taken the view that the damaged left wing threatened re-entry, they could

have executed either of two fallback plans to save the crew of Columbia. Making a spacewalk, the crew could have patched up the

damaged thermal protection on the wing, using any available metal objects from the shuttle, packed with ice. Alternatively, the space shuttle

Atlantis could have been sent into orbit to rescue Columbia's crew via a spacewalk transfer. The latter would have been the

least risky option.

As it happened, Boeing's engineers predicted some heating damage on re-entry, but they were somewhat inconclusive whether this

would result in structural failure. Their overall message, however, was that they believed Columbia would survive re-entry. NASA

Management judged that, despite some concerns raised within Boeing's reports, the Orbiter could not have been damaged by the foam, and

so the mission was allowed to continue to its fateful end.

So how could NASA have made such a terrible decision? The accident investigation report spells it out. The engineers' doubts and

concerns were not adequately communicated to NASA management, and one link in that communication chain was the reporting tool.

Communication Breakdown

PowerPoint is a powerful piece of Microsoft software which creates multimedia presentations - it comes packaged with its suite of office

tools. In years gone by, speakers used visual aids such as transparent slides and overhead projectors to provide a backdrop to their

lectures, but the ease with which they could now knock up a slide set with colour, graphics, animations and all sorts of multimedia inserts

quickly made products like PowerPoint indispensable in the office environment.

You have to know how to use it, of course. Your audience will tend to read the screen rather than listening to what you say, so it's at its

most powerful when it provides supporting information - pictures, graphs, etc - or when it reinforces your main arguments by listing them as

bullet points.

Professor Edward Tufte is an information and

graphic design guru from Yale University, and he had researched into communication failures in a previous space shuttle accident, that of the

Challenger in 1986. This time, Tufte concentrated on the method with which the Debris Assessment Team presented its technical

information on the foam tile strike, and he launched a scathing attack on Boeing's PowerPoint slides. One of the main culprits is represented

below. It's highly technical, so don't concentrate too much on the jargon (SOFI is Spray On Foam Insulation, if you must know). Tufte

described this single slide as 'a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism':

Review Of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration

The existing SOFI on tile test data used to create Crater was reviewed along with STS-107 Southwest Research data Crater overpredicted penetration of tile coating significantly Initial penetration to described by normal velocity Varies with volume/mass of projectile(e.g., 200ft/sec for 3cu. In) Significant energy is required for the softer SOFI particle to penetrate the relatively hard tile coating Test results do show that it is possible at sufficient mass and velocity Conversely, once tile is penetrated SOFI can cause significant damage Minor variations in total energy (above penetration level) can cause significant tile damage Flight condition is significantly outside of test database Volume of ramp is 1920cu in vs 3 cu in for test

This slide summarises the likely damage to the shuttle's wing as predicted by the Crater mathematical model, but it shows the problems

with cramming this into the confines of a PowerPoint slide. Tufte's list of gripes is as long as your arm, but they include:

• The slide has 11 phrases on it, but, including the title and parentheses, these are arranged into no less than six levels of
  
  hierarchy.
• The title is unnecessarily reassuring, where this analysis is based on a mathematical model with very
  
  little data.
• Many technical terms are shortened to fit on the slide, making their meanings ambiguous.
• The word 'significant' is used 5 times. This could indicate that results were statistically significant, where this was not the case.
• Units of measurement are displayed slightly differently in each case.
• The final sentence is indicating that the debris that actually hit Columbia was 640 times larger than that used in the Crater model, a
  
  fact that completely undermines the confidence of the slide's title.

This format was typical. Each slide crammed technical information into a similar hierarchical structure, regardless of its nature. The effect

was to tell management what they wanted to hear - the engineers' underlying concerns were lost when the information was further

condensed by NASA when they briefed their management team. Other, more sceptical NASA engineers referred to this presentation as

'Boeing's PowerPoint Pitch'; in effect, a sales presentation was influencing the life or death decision on

Columbia's crew.

The Aftermath

Two years after the accident, NASA looked again at the concept of 'engineering by PowerPoint', comparing it with other presentation

tools and methods. The Return to Flight Task Group found an organisational culture in which:

...many of the engineering packages brought before formal control boards were documented only in PowerPoint

presentations .... It appears that many young engineers do not understand the need for, or know how to

prepare, formal engineering documents such as reports, white papers or analyses.

Both the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the Return to Flight Task Group concluded that PowerPoint is simply unsuitable for

both reporting and presentation in an engineering environment. They recommended properly-written reports, developed using a

word-processor. PowerPoint is only appropriate for displaying images and videos during presentations.

Edward Tufte has continued his crusade against bad information design, although some would question his impartiality in publishing

articles with titles such as 'PowerPoint is Evil'. Microsoft's Powerpoint product should not be held to blame. If anything, the Columbia was a victim of

PowerPoint's remarkable success, and any other viewgraph-type application software from any other vendor would have been no different.

Yet it is the market leader and like many of Bill Gates' other products it has shaped the way we do business. We just need to understand that

we shouldn't risk ours or anyone elses lives upon it.