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Failure Is Always an Option
Logic Bomb writes "The New York Times has a short but elegant op-ed regarding the different perspectives of engineers and managers and the role that plays in accidents like the space shuttle Columbia disaster. It's the sort of article you'll nod all the way through, then print and leave anonymously on your supervisor's desk. Any tech managers in the Slashdot crowd might have some interesting comments on how the right balance is struck." Henry Petroski has written several good books on engineering and failure.
Was it Thomas Edison that said, "I haven't failed. I just found 10,000 ways that didn't work."?
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Now that money may be in the form of lower gas mileage in a car, or in the form of hundreds of unmanned test flights before putting a human in, or obscene safety margins.
But to pretend that anything is ever perfectly safe is to ignore the fundamental economic issue that at some point you have to stop putting money into safety concerns and just fly the damn thing.
On a project the size of the space shuttle thousands of safety concerns will be brought up. Not everyone of them can be fully investigated. They have to pick and choose based on what is most urgent. Yes, there will be accidents, but otherwise the shuttle would never get off the ground. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and you can say they should have investigated further all you want, but the fact is that there were many other concerns that seemed just as urgent, and some that seemed even moreso.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
I have spent the last few days reading the entire CAIB report and I have to agree that Mr. Petroski is right on target with his observations.
Simply put, the problem was that the engineers concerned with the safe re-entry of the orbiter after the foam strike were put in the position of having to prove a negative. Management wouldn't pay attention to them until they could prove that the strike was *not* safe.
They couldn't prove or disprove the notion that the foam strike had caused critical damage until they got the images, but they couldn't get the images without first proving they needed them to assure the safety of the re-entry.
There had been a number of previous foam strikes, many of them involving this same piece of foam (the left bipod ramp), and all of those shuttles had landed okay, so management believed that this foam strike was similarly okay just because they had gotten away with it so far.
No science. No analysis. Just an assumption that if they had gotten away with ignoring this problem so far, they could continue to ignore it. The schedule was king, not safety.
Engineers know well that "getting away with it" is not evidence of reliability. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to be proportionately successful in their careers to the extent that they can spin "getting away with it" into a career advancement tool.
This is really why the orbiter was lost. This is really why the astronauts died.
Denial is deadly.
The best way to do is to be.
This is the same Homer Hickham about whom October Sky was made, I'm assuming?
It would be nice if more people listened to engineers instead of politicians when it came to science projects, wouldn't it?
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This is always the case it has been for a very a long time. The problem is not NASA's culture so much as the culture of the society around NASA.
The article Misses the big points. When the Challenger blew up blame was apportioned to the engineers that built it not the congressmen who insisted the engines be built in utah. When software is shipped before its ready, blame goes to the programmers that were working 90 hour weeks not the sales people that promised the customer whatever they wanted to hear. When a heartvalve fails blame goes to the inventors that made a device that saved lives, not the insurance companies that wouldnt pay for a proper solution.
Yes managers are willing to take risks, its rare they ever have to pay the price for failure.
NASA isn't getting criticized because it doesn't have perfect safety, it's getting nailed because it has TWICE ignored clear evidence of significant problems and failed to perform even cursory investigations until after the loss of an orbiter and crew.
There was clear evidence of problems with the O-rings before the Challenger was lost. NASA had somebody produce some really cryptic plots, but nobody bothered to really investigate whether the cooler weather on some of these launches might have an influence. It takes a real genius to reduce this to dipping an o-ring into a glass of ice water, but any competent investigator should have been able to reduce the data to plots of damage vs. various independent variables such as temperature at launch or overnight lows.
With Columbia, the arrogance of management is far more stunning. It KNEW that the insulation had flaked off, it KNEW that the insulation had caused surface damage in the past, and it KNEW that some areas on the leading edge of the wing are much more vulnerable to damage than others because of access points. It could have test fired foam at wing mockups at any time, just to have hard proof instead of just hunches that the foam could never cause significant damage to an orbiter... yet it did nothing.
This testing is expensive, of course, but it's really not that much when compared to the cost of a normal launch (isn't that approaching a billion dollars per launch now?), or the various costs associated with the loss of an orbiter and crew. It's akin to failing to spend $10 to check something on your car even though you knew that a mistake would mean that the car would erupt into a fireball and kill everyone inside if you're wrong.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
No, I beg to differ.
Assume NASA did attempt to evaluate the damage and it revealed the Columbia to be a death trap. Yeah, there will be media coverage had it become necessary to send up a repair crew or something.
But there would be an Apollo 13 type effort. Atlantis could go up with a minimal crew and pick up the Columbia crew. Maybe do it in two flights. Leave the Columbia in space until repair becomes possible. Not possible? They'd find a way.
Or, engineer a solution on the ground and figure out a way to get that solution up into space and istalled. Again, an Atlantis crew would head up with the necessary materials and perhaps be the ones to do the repair job. Sounds like the Hubble, doesnt it? Also impossible? They'd find a way.
Engineers are quite capable of great things, and you seem to be underestimating the potential of great thinkers. When JFK made his "before this decade is out" challenge, everyone at NASA thought "No way! You've got to be kidding." But then the people who would do it got thinking of ways they could and they came through.
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