“Space flight is known to be a risky business, but during the minutes before dawn last February 1, as the doomed shuttle Columbia began to descend into the upper atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, only a handful of people — a few engineers deep inside of NASA — worried that the vehicle and its seven souls might actually come to grief. It was the responsibility of NASA’s managers to hear those suspicions, and from top to bottom they failed.”
Link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/11/langewiesche.htm
