In 2003, NASA suffered a serious accident in which seven people died and could have been avoided by something “as simple” as making better PowerPoint slides. This is the case of the STS-107 mission that launched the space shuttle Columbia almost 20 years ago to test the effects of microgravity on the human body, spiders and ants.
After launch and just one day after the mission started, a problem was detected. In space, the shuttle was safe, but NASA did not know how it would respond to reentry on Earth after the eventuality, and this is where PowerPoint makes its own entrance.
When three critical reports were distilled into 28 PowerPoint slides
The problem with this mission was not something out of the ordinary: A piece of spray foam insulation broke off one of the ramps that attached the shuttle to its external fuel tank, and while the crew was rising at a speed of 28,968 kilometers per hour, the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles from the outer edge of the shuttle’s left wing.
The detachment of insulating foam is so common and has happened in so many previous missions that NASA mounts external cameras in the fuel tank just to monitor this type of event. Thanks to that camera they were able to detect that the tile that the foam had hit was on the edge of the wing designed to protect the shuttle from the heat of the Earth’s atmosphere during launch and re-entry.
After analyzing the scenario, it was established that the crew had three options:
Astronauts could go on a spacewalk and visually inspect the helmet.
NASA could launch another space shuttle to pick up the crew.
The crew could simply risk re-entry.
NASA officials sat down with engineers from the Boeing Corporation, who showed them three reports; a total of 28 slides. The most important point in those data showed that the shuttle wing tiles could tolerate the impact of the foam. But, and here’s a key point, this was based on test conditions with foam 600 times smaller than that which had hit the Columbia. 600 veces.
To illustrate this point, this slide was used:
The most important point, life or death information, was left on the last line of the slide
As NASA itself explains in the accident investigation report: a lot of information was lost with the slides, and the priority of the information is easy to misunderstand due to the way it is presented. It’s clearly one of the worst types of slides you’ll ever see: a bunch of text mounted on a flat background with inconsistent font numbers and terrible at grabbing attention.
The investigation criticized multiple elements of the slide in question, but the most important is undoubtedly that the most relevant information was only in the last line: The estimate that the debris that hit Columbia was 640 times larger than that in the data used to calibrate the model on which engineers based their damage assessments.
It is also criticized that extremely vague words for such a delicate and scientific setting such as “significant” and “significant” are used five times on the same slide. And the most ridiculous thing is that both adjectives have meanings that encompass a range from “detectable and largely irrelevant” to “so much damage that everyone dies”.
As information moves up the hierarchy of an organization, from the people doing the analysis, through middle managers, to senior leadership, key explanations and supporting information leak out. In this context, it’s easy to understand how a senior manager could read this powerpoint slide and not realize it’s about a life-threatening situation.
NASA officials listened to the engineers and their PowerPoint. They were considered to have communicated the potential risks. This was interpreted as all data pointing to insufficient damage to endanger the lives of the crew, and they went ahead with Columbia’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere as normal ignoring the other two options.
Unfortunately the shuttle disintegrated into pieces and the entire crew perished.. The shuttle program was suspended for two years while the investigation was launched. An investigation that ended up concluding that the endemic use of PowerPoint slides instead of technical documents was a great example of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.