Required Changes

A lot has been written about the recovery from the Columbia accident in terms of changes we needed to make to get back to flying the Shuttle again. In general, the changes fell into two categories. One bucket contained changes to hardware, the other were changes to management practices.

In the early summer of 2003, we didn’t know how much time we’d eventually have to make these changes—just that we’d take whatever time was necessary to get them done, and with the confidence we did them right....