Richard C. Cook was the guest for this Space Show program to discuss Mr. Cook's book, "Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age." This is an important show because it provides us with an inside of NASA perspective on policy making and engineering and how the two often collide. This program also shows how the executive and legislative branches of the government get involved in operations and engineering, sometimes with deadly results. There are lots of applications for this discussion, not just the Challenger accident. During the show and as a result of listener questions, Richard gave us his take on what a due diligence program should consist of to make sure that policy and pressures do not conflict with the engineering and safety needs of the venture. This was also applicable to the developing suborbital space vehicle industry as Richard talked about possible points of comparison between the private businesses and NASA. We also about informed consent for the astronauts and for the private sector, risk taking, the business responsibility in risk taking the difference in risk taking with a military type vehicle versus a commercial vehicle. One listener asked Richard about the possibility of devaluing human life in risk taking with NASA. You will want to hear his answer. Many other related topics came up including teachers in space, pressuring before and during congressional testimony, blogs, space advocate and general public comments to his thesis in the book and lots more. This is an important show to hear and his book is an important book to read for we can learn much from it. You can email your comments or questions to Richard Cook by visiting his website at www.richardccook.com, then on the left side, click on contact. Please fill out the contact form, mention The Space Show, and Richard will respond to you. The direct URL is http://www.richardccook.com/contact.php. As always, you can email Richard through me at drspace@thespaceshow.com. Richard has many interesting papers on his site but this is the one he talked about during the show in response to another listener question: http://readingwritingmanagement.blogspot.com/2007/03/one-question-richa….
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