How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle • Hacker News Board

Re: How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle

#61

Post by protomyth » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 4:48 PM UTC

jevinskie wrote: post #2

"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…

Like you, I felt some serious disgust at this line given all the other people who contributed to the problem, but also very worried that innocent people were fired, suffered long-term grief, or committed suicide. You better be damn sure before you tell people at the bottom that it is their fault and it better be for their personal incompetence and not a failure of process or design that they have no control over.

Re: How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle

#62

Post by ScottBurson » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 5:22 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #14

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…

You might be interested in one of the comments from the blog page, and Hale's reply:

Sorry Wayne, it seems to me that you launched knowing there was an unresolved problem, not unlike the Challenger accident decision. What else could you do? Ground the vehicle until the problem is fixed!! The crews’ lives and the future of NASA was at stake.

... to which Hale replied, simply, "Yep."

Re: How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle

#63

Post by HarryHirsch » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 9:43 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #12

geuis wrote: post #5

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…

> No, it's not. Accountability is very precisely "your fault", that's all it is. That's pretty much the definition of it.

That. Accountability (worse: "personal accountability" and variants thereof) are a tool provided by the law to determine who to recover damages from after a failure has occurred. It is entirely unsuitable for failure prevention because it is entirely orthogonal to rigorous testing and a culture of workplace safety.

Anyone who insists on accountability on their project does not know what they need. What they get is an extraordinary amount of ass-covering, finger-pointing and blame deflection, though.