What's in this book
- Robert Godwin's edited compilation - primary-source documentation of the 2003 Columbia space-shuttle disaster
- Canonical reference volume documenting the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's findings
- 300+ pages of original investigation documentation across the February 1, 2003 accident
- Part of Godwin's ongoing project to make primary-source NASA documentation broadly available
- For readers of canonical NASA primary-source documentation and the broader NASA Mission Reports series
- A canonical entry in the contemporary space-history reference tradition
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Columbia Accident Investigation Report is the 2003 Apogee Books edition of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report, the U. S. government's official investigation document on the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia on STS-107 (February 1, 2003). The volume reproduces the full CAIB report text plus supporting documentation, with Robert Godwin's editorial introduction.
The CAIB report itself is one of the most rigorously documented accident-investigation reports in U. S. aerospace history. The technical chapters (the foam-strike sequence, the wing leading-edge analysis, the in-flight thermal-protection assessment) are exhaustive. The management-culture chapters (the foam-strike decision-making, the cycle of normalized deviance, the parallels with the Challenger investigation) remain required reading in safety-engineering programs nearly twenty-five years later. The Godwin edition is the most accessible single-volume printing of the full report.
Recommended for safety engineers, for organizational researchers, and for readers of books like the Columbia Accident Investigation Report in the aerospace-accident-documentation tradition (Diane Vaughan's The Challenger Launch Decision is the academic companion). Five stars and an essential reference.
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