Tufte has done some neat stuff but his claim that Challenger (or even more tenuously, Columbia) were caused by bad powerpoint presentations strains credibility.

Tufte has done some neat stuff but his claim that Challenger (or even more tenuously, Columbia) were caused by bad powerpoint presentations strains credibility. The problem wasn't that the right people didn't know the danger. The problem was that they had enormous political pressure on them to move forward, and they were able to discount the danger in their own minds and fail to stop the launch despite being informed.