Twenty year ago this morning I was having coffee when I remembered that the space shuttle was landing, so I turned on the television to watch it. Everything seemed yawningly normal. But then I was interrupted mid-yawn — a very unpleasant sensation, though not as bad as a stifled sneeze — when the commander and pilot of the shuttle failed to respond to calls from the flight controller.
As part of Dennis E. Powell’s twentieth anniversary remembrance of the second shuttle disaster, we are republishing this third part of Dennis E. Powell’s late 80’s and early 90’s cover stories on NASA safety practices that he wrote for TROPIC, the magazine of The Miami Herald. In this piece Powell tells the story of former NASA engineer Bill McInnis who cared too much.
As part of Dennis E. Powell’s twentieth anniversary remembrance of the second shuttle disaster, we are republishing this crucial investigation into NASA’s space shuttle safety practices that he wrote for TROPIC, the magazine of The Miami Herald, on April 9, 1989.
As part of Dennis E. Powell’s twentieth anniversary remembrance of the second shuttle disaster, we are republishing his groundbreaking piece on the earlier Challenger disaster that was the cover story for TROPIC, the magazine of The Miami Herald, on November 13, 1988.
The AI revolution is a threat for artist and information gatherer alike. Like a speeding train, machine learning threatens to disrupt the work of a huge number of workers, and thus the “R” word has started to appear with increasing frequency: regulation. Such does not bode well for the futures of any of us.