Alan Shepard blames the space program's two fatal accidents on one fatal flaw: hi-tech hubris.
"It just shows how insidious it is when people who are very, very successful can think all of a sudden that they can do anything they want to do," the former astronaut said last week at an aviation symposium. in Pensacola, Fla.He said bad decisions at NASA led to a 1967 Apollo cabin fire that killed three astronauts and the 1986 Challenger blast that killed seven crew members seconds after the shuttle lifted off.
"There were similarities between these two incidents," said Shepard, the first American in space. "The similarity was too much success . . . over-confidence and complacency, quite frankly."
Fellow ex-astronaut Scott Carpenter said Shepard was right - but there was more to it.
"Human error is absolutely impossible to eliminate," he said. "We are going to have some losses."