Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word…

My dad headed up the redesign effort on the Lockheed Martin side to remove the foam PAL ramps (where the chunk of foam that broke off and hit the orbiter came from) from the external tank, as part of return-to-flight after the Columbia disaster. At the time he was the last one left at the company from when they had previously investigated removing those ramps from the design. He told me how he went from basically working on this project…

Isn't the title of the post just doing the same thing? It's not death by powerpoint, it's more like "death by foam block and also some inconsequential bad choices by bureaucrats that couldn't do much help the already doomed crew." But that's not as clickable. I have a feeling the crew knew the very significant risks of coming back. But if they inspected and seen the scope of the damage, they would have just been left with an even harder…