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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

Use of jargon is a huge impediment to communication in organizations like NASA and DoD. There's even a glib saying that you won't get your project funded unless you give it a cutesy/cool acronym. This ends up stifling communication because each group has its own pet vernacular that obfuscates meaning unless you are inside the circle.

They could benefit from clear, concise communication that gets to the point

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Read the full deck and tell me what is hard to understand:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.p...

Thank you for posting the full deck. The conclusion is pretty clearly stated that the engineers thought the shuttle would return safely, even with missing tiles. The focus on this one slide out of context seems totally wrong.

"Contingent on multiple tile loss thermal analysis", i.e. "we're running that model now and until we're done we're not sure, but the tests we did so far suggest that a tile loss should not prevent safe return".

It isn't really that unclear. There are formal words, but - unlike typical managerial presentations - there's also content behind them.

Indeed. The conclusion is:

```` Contingent on multiple tile loss thermal analysis showing no violation of M/OD criteria, safe return indicated even with significant tile damage ````

That's going to be difficult for management to push back against.

So the real slide was actually quite different from the one presented in the article. The article shows various errors not present in the real slide (vaires, e.?g., Ln, hanrd). The real slide also use different font weights and bullet symbols. Was that intentional to give a bad impression, or just really sloppy? Or were those slides cleaned up?

I have mixed opinions. I agree that they conclusion is much more clear than the single slide implies. However, the slides do a poor job communicating in many other respects. For example, on the first non-title slide four separate acronyms are used, an only one is defined. (Incidentally, it's one that also has another, different, acronym within industry - M/OD => MMOD). Maybe everyone in the audience already familiar with these terms, but maybe they're not. I think in this case clarity should trump brevity. I think the original site has a particular, biased point of view but also that NASA can often do a poor job communicating.

The part I'm grappling with is how they came to that conclusion despite the "flight condition is significantly outside the test database" acknowledgement as alluded to in the original post. To me, this sounds very much like Challenger in terms of drawing conclusions without hard data to back it up. Easy arm-chair quarterbacking in hindsight, I know, but it seems the through-lines are psychological in nature, not engineering or technical problems.

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