Lyman;
Columbia, and Challenger before it, laid the groundwork for widespread exposure of the stupid things that are done by those previously protected by the culture from disclosure.
We will have to see how everyone reacts. The balance sheet will be written through time, but for me, the worn out buddy sytem and the conspiratorial secrecy that endangers the lives of the public is about to be tested, and there will be many things that are distasteful to know.
How do we know beforehand, that a culture is a buddy system and not an honest system? What are the metrics, beforehand? When do we know that people are "being protected" vice doing their job? How is "conspiratorial secrecy" recognized from "proprietary information" which, in a competitve political economy, is the lifeblood of all organizations? How do we parse and subsequently judge action in different discourses, the most well-known example being the "discussion" between Morton-Thiokol engineers (engineering discourse) and NASA managers at Houston (management/political/economic discourse), regarding the Challenger launch decision. Are the discourses "translatable" into a common language or do we have power politics as the arbiter?