I’ll never forget the first time I saw her, hidden among jigs and tooling with an army around her like worker bees surrounding their queen. Looking up from the floor, the parts that I could see were black and white tiles of every shape, size and thickness arranged in the most complicated jigsaw puzzle I’d ever seen. It had 31,763 pieces, each with a mountain of paperwork accompanying it. Mistakes could be fatal. Swapping or damaging pieces could kill people. For this was Space Shuttle Columbia and astronauts would be riding her soon. There were 1200 of us building her and we were known as the Puzzle People. It took 2 years to finish the job and i watched with trepidation when she finally took John Young and Bob Crippin to orbit and brought them home safely. It was April 12, 1981. I stayed in touch with her after that, contributing experiments, ideas and algorithms. I even gave classes and lectures about her and felt connected through the years. We both got older and wiser as time went by and she became like an old friend I loved to brag about to my human friends. And then one day, another day I’ll never forget, she was gone. It was February 1, 2003 and she disintegrated on reentry somewhere over Texas only 16 minutes before landing. Her death and the deaths of the 7 magnificent astronauts aboard her was attributed not to her much-maligned tile, but to a 1 pound piece of foam that had dislodged from her External Fuel Tank and followed an unlikely path to panel #8 of the leading edge of her left wing—an Achilles heel. It punctured a 2 foot hole in it, allowing hot plasma gases to incinerate the wing and destroy her. That was the underlying cause. The real one was Human Error and here’s the unforgivable part: the foam had hit the wing 81.9 seconds after launch but the end wouldn’t come for 15 more days. NASA knew about it but trivialised because it was foam and foam can’t destroy spaceships, could it? Dire warnings had come from within and without but were ignored. Contractors, news anchors even the spouse of one the astronauts could have done more but stopped short. NASA didn’t even tell the doomed crew who in the words of Astronaut Charley Camarda, would have done something about it: a spacewalk to inspect the damage, a makeshift repair kit like the one that saved Apollo 13, something, anything! 22 years later history is repeating itself. Astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stranded in space for months while NASA struggles to decide how to bring them home. It never should have come to that! SpaceX rockets have flown over 400 times with no fatalities, while Boeings Starliner is an experimental craft with better than a 1 in a 100 chance of killing them. Giving up on Starliner wouldn’t deal Boeing a death blow after all the time and money spent, but, together with its troubled aircraft division, it’s another colossal embarrassment. After 50 years of questions, maybe it’s best to turn over NASA’s heavy hitting to the commercial sector and let it become another federal bureaucracy ripe for Musk’s scissors. On the other hand, when the going gets tough, there’s no guru with all the right answers, not Musk not anyone. There’s some very smart people but they’re toothpicks in a hurricane if the pressure builds high enough. Is NASA immune to such pressure, is SpaceX, Boeing or anyone else in the space biz? And is perfection unrealistic in a place where dangerous things are done to expensive people and lives are at stake second by second? Imagine yourself under such conditions. Surrounded by posters labeled, “Safety is Job 1” or “If you see something SAY something!” WHAT WOULD YOU DO if your boss said get back in line? Would you bypass the chain, raise the red flag or meekly give in? Think about that as you follow the roller coaster ride in the pages of this book. Confronted with this dilemma, how would you act, what would you learn about yourself and those around you