The Columbia PowerPoint

On January 16, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia suffered damage to its thermal protection system when a piece of foam insulation struck its left wing during launch. NASA engineers produced an analysis of the damage using PowerPoint slides that Tufte later dissected in The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. The slides used standard corporate PowerPoint conventions: hierarchical bullet points, varying font sizes, nested indentation to indicate logical subordination. The format fragmented what was, at its core, a complex multivariate technical argument — an argument about the interaction between debris size, impact velocity, thermal protection tile tolerance, and re-entry stress — into a sequence of disconnected phrases distributed across multiple levels of indentation. Each bullet point was factually correct. The argument they collectively constituted was invisible, because the format had no mechanism for representing the argument as a whole. On February 1, 2003, Columbia broke apart during re-entry, killing all seven crew members.