It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product to the point of fantasy,” he wrote. He suggested that agency officials had, from the very beginning, oversold the shuttle in order to maintain their access to federal coffers; and he compared the Marshall engineers’ insistence on flying after the discovery of O-ring damage to Russian roulette: “If you hold a gun to your head and shoot and don’t kill yourself,” he said, “a man would be foolish to say, Let’s spin it and fire again.”
