Engineering Practice & Failure

Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle

Richard Feynman

Management estimated failure probability a thousandfold better than engineers did; reality cannot be fooled by public relations.

Assumes no engineering background — Feynman explains each part before he uses it

To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

Henry Petroski

Argues that engineering progress is driven less by successes than by the close study of failures, because a design that works only reveals that it was adequate, while a design that fails reveals exactly where the margin ran out.

Ethical Decisions — Morton Thiokol and the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

Roger Boisjoly

Boisjoly's own account of trying and failing to stop the Challenger launch argues that an engineer's technical judgment was overridden by a management process built to produce agreement rather than to weigh evidence.

Fundamentals of Engineering Technical Communications

Leah Wahlin

Teaches technical writing as a discipline shaped by the specific audience and purpose of engineering documents — memos, design reviews, technical reports — rather than as generic composition.

Engineering and the Mind's Eye

Eugene S. Ferguson

Argues that engineering design has always depended on non-verbal, visual and tacit judgement rather than calculation alone, and that engineering education's near-total shift to the latter has produced real, traceable failures.

Root Cause Analysis Guidance Document

United States Department of Energy

Systematises root cause analysis into a repeatable method — causal factor charting followed by a fixed set of root-cause categories — arguing that treating only the proximate cause of an incident guarantees its recurrence.

GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide

United States Government Accountability Office

Codifies twelve steps for a defensible program cost estimate and argues most government engineering program overruns trace to a specific, identifiable step skipped or done badly, not to bad luck.

NASA Cost Estimating Handbook

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Argues that a credible engineering cost estimate needs the same rigour as the engineering itself — documented assumptions, an explicit basis of estimate, and a stated uncertainty range — and that an estimate without these is a guess dressed as a number.

Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880

JoAnne Yates & Craig N. Murphy

Traces how voluntary technical standards bodies came to govern engineering practice worldwide without the force of law, arguing they supplied a coordination among competing manufacturers that none of them could gain by competing on incompatible designs.

On The Quantitative Definition of Risk

Stan Kaplan & B. John Garrick

Defines risk not as a single number but as the complete set of answers to three questions — what can go wrong, how likely is it, and what are the consequences — giving quantitative risk assessment a checkable structure rather than a single expected-value figure.

NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Handbook

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Frames spaceflight project management as managing technical, cost and schedule risk simultaneously across a project's lifecycle gates, arguing a programme's biggest risks are usually visible at the requirements phase but only become expensive once hardware exists.

Rational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies

John Downer

Argues against Charles Perrow's normal accident theory: catastrophic failures in complex engineered systems are not statistically inevitable but trace to specific, correctable institutional and epistemic failures, and treating them as inevitable is itself a choice with consequences.