What was the charter of the “Diaz Team” in addressing the CAIB report?
In looking at the Columbia accident, the CAIB report focused on two different sets of causes: the physical cause of the accident as well as the organizational causes. Physical causes tend, by nature, to be local to a particular project or program. But the assertion by the CAIB was that organizational flaws had as much to do with the accident as did any of the physical causes. The agency wanted to know if behaviors like the ones cited in the CAIB report existed on a broader scale than simply the Space Flight Program. Managing or leading entails the responsibility to have a justification for what you’re doing and to be able to articulate that justification in a way that nine times out of ten is not going to be second-guessed. How did you go about collecting information? The team recognized that we needed input from other people, in terms of what they thought about the CAIB report and what they extracted from it. We engaged Headquarters. We engaged field center directors and their staffs.
