>>administrators weren't able to properly discern trivial matters from life threatening ones That suggests a very serious flaw in the overall capability, serio

>>administrators weren't able to properly discern trivial matters from life threatening ones That suggests a very serious flaw in the overall capability, seriousness and knowledge of the project of the person making that decision. The administrators are not that stupid. Reading the article carefully. These people were worried about the launch to be delayed by an year. That subsequently brings up the question about how that would work for their careers. Also what is the downside for these people. Say the Shuttle crashes, they are not going to be billed $2 billion or charged with manslaughter. Heck, all they get is a job transfer in the worst possible case(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Ham#Columbia_disaster_and_investigation_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Ham#Columbia_disaster_an...). If you have literally no repercussions for making wrong decisions. You have now incentivized the administrators to make whatever decisions works best for them personally. No amount and quality of engineering reports are going to work from here.