Apollo 1 redux: the inevitability of disaster

My friend Jim Oberg has written an article about the Apollo 1 tragedy. He is a space historian, and he knows his stuff. His angle on this was 1) the loss of these people and the missions were due to preventable mistakes, including arrogance at key places in NASA administration, and 2) we need to learn from these mistakes; not about hardware or safety, but about the roles of human beings in decision-making when it comes to spaceflight. This is very different that the way I wrote my own Apollo 1 article. But I think we both have a point. When I wrote the essay, I did not mean to exonerate the people of mistakes made. Jim is right; the disasters of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia are the more tragic because they were preventable. I think all disasters are preventable, and that in every case it is probable that ...