The hierarchy also produced a disconnect between the engineers and the managers. The administrators at NASA abandoned the dirty-hands approach of the Apollo era. The managers were no longer intimately involved with the flight technology, and they eventually lost touch. The culture shifted from one focused on research and development to one that operated more like a business with production pressures.26 The engineers were the ones with the dirty hands, and most of them still believed—despite what the bureaucrats were saying—that the space shuttle was a risky, experimental technology.27 But the
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