Making Sure NASA Learns the Right Lessons

NASA has to fight the forgetting, commetary, Jim Oberg, MSNBC

"If we accept the "inevitability" of the disaster, and of the Challenger and Columbia tragedies that followed (and are also memorialized now in a three-for-one NASA observance), and if we congratulate ourselves for "how much the sacrifices taught us," we are ducking a fearsome responsibility. It is this: We should have known already, and people should not have had to die to remind us. The later disasters were not "accidents," random and unavoidable — they were consequences of complacency and carelessness."