31–40 of 63 posts
A great post, especially since it seeks to get at the truth of something that has implications for future missions, at the risk of the OP's reputation. This part is one of the more disturbing parts though, and a good reminder of why technical persons of all fields, whether rocket scientists or programmers, should not adopt a "Well, we worked hard and we're smart so I'm sure everything's fixed" > What you probably don…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that, the Shuttle was very much like the Concorde: a unique and complex system beyond the edge of knowledge (at its creation), full of flaws and working through a combination of sheer luck and heroic efforts.
Actually the space shuttle is the safest launch vehicle to date. From the ones that have at least 100 launches (in order to be able to properly compute stats for them), here are their failure rates as taken from http://www.ontonix.com/Blog/Outliers_-_understanding_Nature_... : 2% US Space Shuttle 5% R-7 (Russian Soyuz) 5% Ariane 1-4 (European) 6% Tsyklon (Russian) 7% Kosmos (Russian) 10% Thor/Delta/N1/N2/H1 (US) 11%…
A great post, especially since it seeks to get at the truth of something that has implications for future missions, at the risk of the OP's reputation. This part is one of the more disturbing parts though, and a good reminder of why technical persons of all fields, whether rocket scientists or programmers, should not adopt a "Well, we worked hard and we're smart so I'm sure everything's fixed" > What you probably don…
No, it's about uncertainty. You have a stated problem "the foam that came off didn't come off because of the reasons we thought it did." Now you have no other ideas besides what you've already considered and tested for 26 months. What do you do? Possibly spend another 2 years investigating and find nothing? Or conclude that the risk is small enough to fly while being vigilant about the problem and looking for more da…
The OP doesn't say how conclusive this "side note" was, or if it was one such note among many others. If it is the latter situation, then yes, it's understandable that it was seen as an acceptable blind spot.
But the situation, as the OP describes it, sounds pretty clear cut: The foam issues could come from poor installation procedures. But testing found that the defective foam "could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect"...
So I'm just interested in knowing the level of conclusiveness in that sidenote.
"We informed the foam technicians at our plant in Michoud Louisiana that they were the cause of the loss of Columbia..." That to me is pretty disgusting. In an incident like the loss of Columbia, there is no one, true "root cause". To assign blame to those foam technicians was disingenuous and just another instance of "passing the buck" that seems to happen so often in the post-mortem of NASA failures. NASA knew of e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understand the type of organization NASA is. First, accountability is everything. It's not that there are big internal political struggles (there are), but more importantly accountability is required for high safety. We aren't talking about a 10 person startup where a bad commit to production takes down a site for a few hours. We're talking about people's lives, careers, and the safety of millions of people that coul…
> accountability is required for high safety It's not. That's complete bullshit, and the On-Board Software Group demonstrated it by being as flawless as can be during the whole history of the Shuttle: as far as I know there was no personal accountability in the OSG, the only thing accountable was The Process supported by a strong culture of adversarial testing. Personal accountability in such a system brings politics…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> accountability is required for high safety It's not. That's complete bullshit, and the On-Board Software Group demonstrated it by being as flawless as can be during the whole history of the Shuttle: as far as I know there was no personal accountability in the OSG, the only thing accountable was The Process supported by a strong culture of adversarial testing. Personal accountability in such a system brings politics…
There may not have appeared to have been any personal accountability, but make no mistake if anything had gone wrong with the On-Board Software the EXACT same accountability process would have been initiated to ensure that the same human error did not occur for a second time.
Left to its own devices, the group would most certainly have operated as it did every time it found fault in its output: find out how The Process had allowed for a fault to be introduced and reach output, find out how to make The Process prevent the introduction and/or release of such faults, fix The Process.
So no, the "exact same accountability process" would most definitely not have been initiated within the group, a very different one would have taken place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that, the Shuttle was very much like the Concorde: a unique and complex system beyond the edge of knowledge (at its creation), full of flaws and working through a combination of sheer luck and heroic efforts.
Actually the space shuttle is the safest launch vehicle to date. From the ones that have at least 100 launches (in order to be able to properly compute stats for them), here are their failure rates as taken from http://www.ontonix.com/Blog/Outliers_-_understanding_Nature_... : 2% US Space Shuttle 5% R-7 (Russian Soyuz) 5% Ariane 1-4 (European) 6% Tsyklon (Russian) 7% Kosmos (Russian) 10% Thor/Delta/N1/N2/H1 (US) 11%…