Slashdot Mirror
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.
In the case of my last software project, engineers who worried about bugs that the software may have suffered during design were ineffective in getting it properly inspected before launch.
"No boss, I have no idea where that article printed out 15 times and strewn across your office came from........ It looks like a good article though."
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
By Homer Hickam
When I go to the Cape and watch the Shuttle being launched, I still get a lump in my throat watching it soar. Even though I no longer work for NASA, its thunder affirms my dreams for spaceflight. Still, when I put emotion aside, I can't ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA's Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can't. Why not? Because the Shuttle's engineering design, just as Vietnam's political design, is inherently flawed.
Much has been made of the report produced by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). I've read newspaper articles that called it "scathing." Hardly. Its tepid recommendations probably had Shuttle managers who made poor decisions dancing with relief. It gave them a pass by proclaiming "culture" made them do it.
I don't believe there's a NASA culture. There is, however, a Shuttle cult. It is practiced like a religion by space policy makers who simply cannot imagine an American space agency without the Shuttle. Well, I can, and it's a space agency which can actually fly people and cargoes into orbit without everybody involved being terrified of imminent destruction every time there's lift-off. With some reservations, written in the politest language, the CAIB recommended to keep Shuttles flying but with more inspections, more bureaucracy (an outside safety agency), and more money. But piling on more inspections, people and dollars won't make the Shuttle safer. Neither will the safety sensitivity training that will probably be dumped on top of the overworked, disillusioned NASA engineers. My God, they've already dedicated their very souls to keep the Shuttle flying safely! The truth is, no amount of arm-waving about "culture" can fix a flawed design.
Take a look at the Shuttle stack and what do you see? A fragile spaceplane sitting on the back of a huge propellant tank between two massive solid rocket boosters. The Shuttle has to sit right in the middle of all the turmoil of launch because we once believed it would be cheaper to bring back those engines and rebuild them than to build new ones. That has not proved to be the case -- far from it -- but it has left us with a crew sitting in the most vulnerable position possible in terms of design. Simply put, had that spaceplane been on top of the stack, the destruction of Challenger and Columbia wouldn't have occurred. The CAIB ignored this flawed design and that makes their conclusions suspect: no amount of inspections or condemning another NASA generation to worry over this thing will solve it.
So let's get practical. We can't just shut the thing down. We need the Shuttle to finish the space station and also to keep the Russians and Chinese from dominating space. I'm not willing to see that occur while we dither. Human spaceflight is important to this country. But the Shuttle is as safe as you're going to get with what's in place today. Let's put some tough engineers in charge, fly it 10 more times over the next four years with hand-picked crews to finish the space station and meet our international obligations. Then close the program and replace it with expendable launchers and a shiny new spaceplane. And, this time, put it on top.
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.
The shuttle is an example of a boondoggle. It became pork because the orginal purpose of a fast and cheap ship was changed to a massive space truck that could take everything and do everything. The managers should of said stop when it was no longer a reusable ship, but just a reusable frame. It reminds me of the Bradely problems, where design changes killed it and its purpose. Multitasking should only be done once a project is done. After all, a jack of all trades is a master of none.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
Failure Is Always an Option
By HENRY PETROSKI
URHAM, N.C. -- Scientists seek to understand what is, the aerospace pioneer Theodore von Karman is supposed to have said, while engineers seek to create what never was. The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists the vehicle was a tool; to engineers it was their creation.
With the release of the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, there is a new focus on the "culture" of NASA. Engineers have played a prominent but not a controlling role in that culture, both in the design of the shuttle and in the planning of its missions. When the report speaks of NASA's "broken safety culture," the particular failure it cites is "a consistent lack of concern" that Columbia may have been damaged by debris at takeoff. But perhaps NASA can be better understood by examining the culture that arises from the inevitable -- and healthy -- tension among scientists, managers and engineers.
A common misconception about how things such as space shuttles come to be is that engineers simply apply the theories and equations of science. But this cannot be done until the new thing-to-be is conceived in the engineer's mind's eye. Rather than following from science, engineered things lead it. The steam engine was developed before thermodynamics, and flying machines before aerodynamics. The sciences were invented to explain the accomplishments -- and to analyze their shortcomings.
The design of any device, machine or system is fraught with failure. Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail. If gases escaping from a booster rocket can lower efficiency or cause damage, then O-ring seals are added. If the friction of re-entry can melt a spacecraft, then a heat shield is devised.
Much of design is thus defensive engineering: containing, shielding and fending off anticipated problems on the drawing board and computer screen so that they cannot bring down the design when it flies. Obviously, total success can only come if every possible mode of failure is identified and defended against.
Engineering is also very much about numbers. O-rings must be sized; the thickness of heat shields specified; the weight of insulation calculated. Often, the numbers work at cross purposes, as when increasing shield material decreases available payload. Engineering design is ultimately the art of compromise.
What results from the design process is a thing that has unique characteristics. It can withstand the conditions for which it was designed as long as it maintains its integrity. There is usually some leeway allowed, for engineers know that operating conditions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Until it fails, how far beyond design conditions a system can be pushed is never fully known.
But engineers do know that nothing is perfect, including themselves. As careful and extensive as their calculations might be, engineers know that they can err -- and that things can behave differently out of the laboratory. On the space shuttles, O-rings got scorched, heat tiles fell off, foam insulation broke free. To engineers, these unexpected events were incontrovertible evidence that they did not fully understand the machine.
Engineers do not feel comfortable with things they do not understand. It is at this point that they begin to act more like scientists. In the case of the scorched O-rings, the engineers studied burn patterns. They looked for a correlation between damage and temperature, and they warned about launching when the temperature was outside the bounds of their experience and scientific study.
If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology. Successful, albeit flawed missions indicated to them not a weak but a robust machine. When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank. In the case of Columbia, engineers who worried about damage that the
The problem is that people are afraid that if the shuttle stops flying space exploration will stop. Public support will wane and funcing will slow. I happen to disagree but there are many in the space program who do not.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
After you make such significant strides in space exploration in the late 60's and early 70's, then have your funding cut by almost every President since Nixon, you're bound to start taking short-cuts and missing things. Remember... space is still deadly. In my book, when you're dealing with something that could very easily kill you, you don't short-change yourself. The problem is that when you have no money to spend on things you need, and a time limit to do certain things, you don't have any other choice.
The problem NASA has right now is trying to convince the rest of the country that what they're trying to do is worth spending the money on. Why worry about what Saddam can do if we could all just move to Mars (for instance)? On the other hand, funding was cut because nothing significant was happening... but nothing significant was happening because funding was cut. It's a vicious cycle.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Sounds like a poster I've seen somewhere. That article title should definitely be made into a Demotivational product.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
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.
I have to admit up front that I am biased against NASA on primarily ethical grounds. To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens. In the U.S., this is the principle upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights is based, and the primary ligitimate activities of government, the police, courts, and defense, are inferrable from that.
Everything has an opportunity cost. The money spent on NASA could otherwise be spent elsewhere, such as aiding the homeless or better road infrastructure, and preferably on something the person earning the money (the taxpayer) himself chose.
Sure, it's nice to be able to explore space and determine facts about physics and cosmology, and test theories against empirical information, but I think at some point the costs associated with expanding the realm of science to more obscure areas, in the shorter term, are too high. And, yes, I know the argument that expanding basic science can lead to invention that benefits the individual, but personally I'd put more faith in the ability of industry to use the money making targeted investments while hiring scientists, than effective production from NASA. At some point I think we have to say the money can be better spent than knowing more about the behavior of some unreachable binary star. Eventually, that information will likely come anyway, as a function of better theoretical models. Why do we need it now, assuming it isn't primarily to give a Ph.D. something to play with?
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
- No effective competition
- No way to inexpensively prototype or proof-of-concept things and test them in the intended deployment environment
- Few efficiencies of scale from being able to buy parts widely used and commoditized
- Little economic justification for the expense, even in the instances where the mission is "successful"
- No realistic, market-driven benchmarks for the performance of the managers or engineers
In the end, I don't feel that NASA is an optimal way to spend money, and since it's at least in part my money, I should be able to make this decision. Perhaps some kind of opt-in "NASA" checkbox, like I've seen opt-in "environmental" checkboxes on tax forms. I'd be content with that.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
If I anonymously placed this on my manager's desk, he would wander out and ask absently:
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
It was meant to be a reminder to prepare for bad scenarios and overcome them before they occured. Rather than just saying "that downside will not happen".
and to analyze their shortcomings.
Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail
Spot on.
Where I work we have independent feasibilty reviews of each new product concept. Not only does a new product need to do well in the market, it has to be profitable enough, and not expose the company to disproprtionate risk for the reward.
The reviews are always done by a department not affiliated with the one creating the new product. This way the review can stay relatively objective regarding new sales.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
They are always on the cutting edge. Putting safety behind technological progress is necessary do achieve great things. Yes human life is not something to take lightly, but NASA has done a better job of protecting people than a few larger (cough military cough) government institutions. Historically NASA has taken great risk to accomplish new milestones in less time than most would think possible. That trend obviously continues today.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I opened this at work, and the title bar reads:
"Failure is always an option - Microsoft Internet Explorer"
Gotta love it!
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
(blatantly stolen from fortune)
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.
I work for an auto supplier. In one of the prototype plants, there was a banner for one of the new car's engineering team.
"Failure is NOT and option."
It struck me as odd at the time. It just doesn't sound like motivation. It strikes me as a negative way of looking at things. There was no "We can succeed together!" or "Hard work will pay off in the end!" Nope. Failure is not an option.
Later I saw the perfect response in a magazine, and was disappointed that the banner was taken down before I could add it.
"Failure is not an option; it comes standard with every vehicle."
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
What's really the root of the problem is that no one has provided any political leadership for the American spce program for 30 years -- since Nixon took office, in other words.
If Nixon had provided the right kind of leadership -- pointing to a destination and declaring "Go There!" -- we would have built a spacecraft and the supporting infrastructure to get the job done.
Instead, the nation's political leadership turned to the NASA bureaucracy and asked "Well, what next?" NASA, unsurprisingly, asked for a lot, didn't get it, and consequently saddled itself with the sorry combination of a lame spacecraft design and nowhere for that craft to go except low-Earth orbit.
It was, however, a guarantee that NASA's budget wouldn't flatline.
Folks, the problem of getting people into and out of LEO was solved satisfactorily in the 1960's. So was the problem of getting tons of hardware to LEO. We did not -- and do not -- need the Shuttle to get either people or hardware to orbit safely, reliably, and cheaply.
The fact that the U.S., 40 years later, can't get people or hardware to LEO is a testament to the failure of both NASA and every president after Kennedy to have a clue about where to go next.
Think what we might have accomplished if we'd never built the Shuttle, but, instead, put the money into building more Saturns and more Apollos, more Titans and more Geminis, and expanded SkyLab rather than scuttling it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Sadly, many higher-ups see the solution in CMM, or other quality programs that produce reams of paper, but those same top-level managers ignore the economics of trying to develop too much, in too little time, with too little money. I manage the development of custom software projects for a Fortune 100 company, and at the end of the day, the sales dweeb sells whatever he has to to make his commission, and the engineering group is left with impossible constraints. CMM would probably work well if the entire company bought into it, but I've not seen that yet.
Likewise, NASA sees us (the public) crying about cost overruns and the return on our investment. Ultimately, that comes back down to the line-level managers at NASA, where no matter what the good intentions, the pressures of $$$ and time will always apply.
We need to decide if space travel is worth the cost (done properly, and left to engineering minds to decide what "properly" means), or worth the risks of doing it at lower cost. Like my company, NASA has squeaked by on luck for quite some time.
In my experience, the luck ALWAYS runs out.
Tim
Google partnered link
failure *absolutely* should be focused on during design. Not knowing your potential points of failure, and not designing appropriately to mitigate their chances of being realized, is irresponsible at best and disastrous at worst.
i find your statement "Focus on doing your best. If you made a mistake, fix it" somewhat oxymoronic. your "best" should take into account possible failures and likely causes thereof in an attempt to *prevent* mistakes, not apologize for them afterward.
mistakes will happen. it is an inevitability. but to use that inevitability as an excuse to intentionally deemphasize the importance of analyzing failure points during development is a bad practice.
...I only write business applications and websites and stuff like that. At least when my creation fails, no one dies. These NASA guys...they have it rough.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
It's worth thinking about what would have happened if the damaged Shuttle had been images by USAF ground cameras, and it became clear that re-entry was going to be a disaster. The shuttle and crew would have been stuck in orbit, with worldwide publicity, while NASA tried to come up with a fix. They probably wouldn't have succeeded. On-orbit rescue using Atlantis has been discussed as marginally possible, and on-orbit patching has been suggested, but most likely, they wouldn't have worked.
Think of the PR fallout. Seven astronauts stuck in orbit for most of a month, with constant TV coverage, followed by their deaths on worldwide TV. That would have been career-ending for most of NASA's top management. Letting them crash saved the jobs of top people at NASA.
Worst case, a rushed launch of Atlantis could have resulted in losing two shuttles. That would have ended the Shuttle program.
Henry Petroski wrote
>If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology.
Is this the difference between programmers and engineers?
Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month (go read it!) argues that programmers are optimists. We work with pure thought-stuff, so of course it should work the way we think it will. Bzzt. But that optimism drives projects. Who'd start a big project knowing how many stomach-churning bugs, random external changes, stupid feature requests, irrelevant but deadly external bugs, dependencies and just plain stapler misfires would come up? How many projects, open or closed source, would have started if the actual development timeline had been known in advance?
This reminds me of a decent book I read about a year ago, called To Engineer is Human . It discusses the role engineering failures play in our many engineering successes.
Interesting read, though the author tends to drone on and on a bit. He makes some great points, though, not the lest of which is that (gasp!) engineers are not perfect, and thus, failures will happen. And guess what--most of the time, we learn from those failures!
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
"The Columbia Accident Investigation Board has recommended that NASA establish an independent Technical Engineering Authority. This would put responsibility for technical matters where it rightly belongs -- with the engineers who, because they know how the space shuttle was designed, also know best how it can fail."
After reading this, my immediate thought was, "Goodie, who going to be appointed to manage this new technical authority? A seasoned NASA manager, right?
Our best hope is that NASA is wise enough to make this Authority a panel of rotated, working engineers!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Hickam is on track, but I'm not sure we need spacecraft with wings. Wings are only useful on airplanes. By definition, spacecraft are not airplanes. NASA has thrown away too much money pursuing winged spacecraft for their own sake, rather than dealing with the issue of getting people to and from space. They might as well try to make a submarine that can fly. Probably do-able, but: why?
Let's decide that we will do two things:
1) Any human space travel beyond LEO will start from LEO in spacecraft built in LEO and that return to LEO. If we do that, we will never need to spend money trying to build airplane-spacecraft hybrids.
2) Let's use big expendable boosters to get hardware to LEO, and smaller expendable boosters to get people to LEO. Put the people in modern versions of the Apollo or Gemini craft (the so-called "Big" Gemini was an appropos solution)>
And, let's also decide that the main reason to build a space station in LEO is to serve as a construction yard and a gas station for trips elsewhere. Let's put aside the quaint notion that the reason we need to be in space is to "do science".
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
We can finish the space station with rockets and space craft from both Russia and European Space agency...
The future of space exploration and discovery is no longer national but international..its time NASA wake up..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It's a sober and informed discussion of engineering safety (mostly but not entirely computer related) that's been going on for almost twenty years.
Try entering "shuttle" in the search form. I did just now and found the brief, grim announcement of the Challenger explosion.
If you prefer to curl up with a dead tree by the fire, read moderator Peter Neumann's Computer Related Risks. It is also available in Japanese translation.
Now, few of us are likely to ever risk our lives flying in space shuttles. Maybe some of us might write the code or design the machinery the astronauts will trust with their lives. But all of us depend on computers every day for our livelihood, and many of us depend on them for our lives more than you would feel comfortable with if you understand the implications of it.
Fly on an airplane lately? Anything a little more modern than a DC-3? Do you know what fly by wire means? Ever write code with a stack overflow or heap corruption? What do you suppose that means for the embedded systems that run today's commercial aircraft?
Does your car have antilock brakes?
Read RISKS. It will make you a better programmer. Because it will put the fear of God into you.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Reporter: So, Commander, after all you've just gone through, I have to ask you the same question a lot of people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?
Commander Sinclair: No, we have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask 10 different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get 10 different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morabuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes. And all of this.. all of this was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
From "Infection", first season of Babylon 5
I work in the Automotive sector and most of the sytems and procedures we use to judge and prioritize risk come directly or indirectly from NASA. It's wierd to think that the Agency which developed the DFMEA (Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis) is now getting slammed for having a poor safety culture.
-Pinkoir
I've been involved in engineering literally all my life. My dad was an engineer and as a small child I remember going to work with my dad and being in awe of all the stuff he had to 'play' with. I never wanted to be anything else! Unfortunately, in the scheme of things we are the workers, the ones who toil withput credit. The managers take all of that. In the 1980's as a contract engineer I built a Boston FM radio station from scratch (WFNX), yet they didn't even see fit to invite me to its sign on party! When I asked why, I was told: "You were paid well for your work, isn't that enough?". They actually believed they paid me too much to make their property worth many millions morethan it was before. Needless to say from that time forward, I did only precicely what they paid me to do (and what they asked me to do), nothing more. Part of the problem is we ALLOW ourselves to be treated in this way! The plumber, electrician or auto mechanic don't. Why do we? I think one answer is UNION. They realize there is respect and safety in numbers. Are we too good, too elite to do the same?
Our management bought a bunch of copies of a book and put it on our (engineers) desks.
The book?
"The inmates are running the asylum"
A book which basically says that engineers don't know squat about schedules and "real world" concerns and need to be managed.
I'm not working on software that's of a life and death nature, but still...
fair enough, point taken. :)
i personally have a bit of a different philosophy. to me, a focus on success presupposes a focus on points of failure.
i can develop an algorithm to process foo and focus intently on getting all the little details just right (focus on the success of the algorithm). but if i fail to perform appropriate checking at critical points, then that algorithm may very well be useless in anything but an academic environment.
focusing on failure begets failure, sure. but my point was that a focus on failure *analysis* is very much a vital part of the design process, at least as much so as a focus on successful implementation.
good luck with your studies, and don't forget to analyze your points of failure
Can we? Good question...
A couple maybe-relevant personal opinions:
1. As pointed out by others in this thread, basic space research has had a bunch of other benefits in other industries. From a body politic perspective, I'd say we've benefitted overall from it, so it seems a net-beneficial exercise, at least to me.
2. NASA does a horrible job qualifying the "why" of these programs. I think they need to point out benefits other than space just being a Cool Place To Explore.
3. If you're saying that NASA needs a little more oversight and thought in deciding which programs to fund and how to manage them, I absolutely agree with you.
Yes, it's the same Homer Hickam.
-h-
wouldn't you have to have it translated into a dilbert cartoon first?
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
Pundits have claimed that the parallel launch configuration of the orbiter and external tank are a design flaw. Hog wash. The size of the orbiter precludes an inline configuration. If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Now that a major risk of known to be debris strike, to avert it why not have the shuttle ascend right side up? The shuttle currently flies upside down for two (lousy) historical reasons: to simplify the manuver for RTLS abort, and a for line of sight radio link with the ground and antennae on the nose of the orbiter. There are no groundstations down range anymore. RTLS will not be made any more insanely risky than it already is by having the orbiter stack roll 180 degrees to an RTLS attitude. The shuttle already rolls to heads up after 5 minutes of flight in order to acquire the TDRS satellite for tracking and communications. Doing so in flight through the lower atmosphere should have added benefits. Tank debris will tend to fall away from the orbiter instead of into it. The lift provided by the orbiter wings should improve performance.
an ill wind that blows no good
At this point the X-Prize gives me more hope than NASA.
I resent that.
This is not how professional software developers behave.
What a real professional would say is one of....
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
I knew one nice lady (a rarity in both respects) whose entire job consisted of going from meeting to meeting carrying a stack of paper at least a foot high. And this was a project that was about 1000 times smaller than the shuttle project.
That's a good question and it has been answered.
They could have gotten Atlantis up in time to rescue the crew. With alterations to work schedules, activity levels and such the Columbia crew could have survived until Feb 15th, and Atlantis, assuming a problem-free launch protocol, could have gotten up there by February 10th. They covered this in the CAIB report, section 6.4, pages 173-174.
It would not have been without risk, and they could have lost TWO orbiters and TWELVE crew members if Atlantis failed on re-entry, but had they gotten the images everyone admits that they probably would have been able to tell that Columbia was doomed by January 18th.
The limiting consumable was not fuel, it was the lithium hydroxide they use to scrub CO2 from the air. They had enough to go until about February 15-16th, they had enough oxygen for perhaps another day after that.
The best way to do is to be.
Here are two articles (part 1 and part 2) about the history of flying submarines. Great stuff. It's in Russian, so you will need to use the fish or just check out the photos.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I believe that ice forms on the tanks as a result of the supercooled O2 in the rocket, not because of the weather. The launch could have happened anywhere any any time and the ice/foam problem would still exist.
A successful rescue could have been a real boost to the space program and if not we could always get Ron Howard to make a film about it that would be.
A serious attempt at a rescue would have certainly got people more involved emotionally with the space program.
Most tantalizing to me though is the notion that perhaps if Americans had been seriously looking to the skies and thinking about rescuing people aboard the shuttle, we might have actually managed to avoid entangling ourselves in Iraq. (OK, unlikely for soooo many reasons.)
When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank.
What a dark, yet utterly true statement. Do the NASA and contracting company managers sleep well today knowing that in 1986 their decisions cost lives?
Edward Tufte, author of some amazing books on information display, wrote in Envisioning Information on the Challenger disaster. Looking at the materials prepared by engineers, he saw that they had correctly correlated temperature with O-ring failure. Yet their materials, hastily prepared during the 11th hour, failed to convince managers to abort the launch. Tufte shows a design of a simple graph that shows temperature on the abscissa and burn-through on the ordinate, and any manager could draw a line through the points and extrapolate out to the bitter cold Florida day that cost the shuttle.
Having my own share of bad managers, I have to wonder, would it have made any difference?
We'll fix it in one of the upcomming service packs.
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NASA has already released information that states that they could have put Columbia into a low resource consumption mode that would have extended the mission duration to over a month, enough time to do a very quick preparation of another space shuttle to launch with a minimal crew. NASA admitted that it would be a very risky mission and the amount of time that it would have taken was on the ragged edge of Columbia's endurance margin, but it could have been done.
Also, a spacewalk could have been done - there were two EVA suits on the shuttle. Some sort of makeshift repair was possible. What we don't know (and hopefully will never HAVE to know) is how well such a repair would have worked.
There is a good article about this at Spaceflight Now. There are some very good quotes regarding a previous shuttle damage incident and about the merits of rescues and repairs.
-h-
That's the major flaw with government underwriting a space program. You have to get public support for it. Let private enterprise underwrite it, and all you need is commercial interest. That's a MUCH easier beast to summon.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Oh, because you've forgotten the basic truisms:
Private sector ALWAYS GOOD.
Government sectore ALWAYS BAD.
I've tried to say it here and other places before, with mixed reactions:
The government has no monopoly on stupidity. The success of the cartoon strip, "Dilbert" proves that business has its share - across the board.
I used to imagine that Scott Adams worked for my employer, but when he revealed that he worked for Pac Bell, I decided that the stupidity he writes of was universal to the high-tech industry. Then I found that my sister-in-law, who works in a doctors' office, finds it "meaningful," and others in non-high-tech say the same. Stupidity appears universal.
(No doubt some of you will apply it to this post, as well.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Its elegant.
Our space program needs a big KISS logo.
I think that the author was really off the mark.
First, the engineer/scientist comparison is incomplete. There is a third category, the inventor. He can often be one of the two, often he is all three.
The engineer leverages science to build useful creations. The scientist researchers the way the universe works, he often cares nothing for invention, only knowledge.
The inventor really doesn't CARE about science OR engineering. He just wants something that works and is happy when it does. If it fails, he will invent something better. He'll use science and engineering if it furthers his goals.
The beueracrat is of course the forth factor that tries to get engineers, scientists and inventors to serve some other goal. Sometimes the public well-being, sometimes his own. Most often he serves his bosses well being in pursuit of his own which may or may not correspond to the well being of an organization (like the public interest).
Part of serving your bosses best interest is not making him look bad. When you ground your project, your project looks bad irregardless of whether it's the right thing to do. It causes the schedule to slip, and somewhere up the line the big boss is staking his reputation on it. Thats how you get to be the big boss, making promises and coming through.
The truth is that failure is a part of success. Risk is a fundamental part of achievement and risk will ALWAYS produce failures at some point.
I am disspointed at the nature of Columbia's failure. However, in such a game as space travel, risk is an incredible factor. Despite an incredible effort to systematically mitigate risk, you will have failures.
Whether it's from the managements perspective or the engineers, failure will inevitably occur. The prime risk for the managers is that NOTHING would get done if they did EVERYTHING the engineers wanted to. The perfect system isn't created, it evolves. And evolution NEEDS failure to point out mistakes.
In this case, the managers were wrong. Their stonewalling and mindless dedication to schedule produced the death of a crew and the loss of a multi-billion dollar vehicle. In some other case, it could be an engineer who used the wrong unit system or an engineer that pendantically freeted over an issue that ultimately wasn't that important.
The lesson is to seek balance. And of course, even when you have balance you will have failures. Unfortunatly, for NASA, their failures are always VERY unforgiving.
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But try as I might, I can't lay 100% of the blame on them: they see the budget for aero and space research being cut (more tax-cuts for the wealthy!!!) and they know they need to get public opinion behind them. That means the Shuttle must fly, and it must be a media spectacle.
The truth of the matter is:
- much of the "research" that is done on Shuttle flights could be done just as well by unmanned missions; and
- "reusable spacecraft" is an oxymoron at the current state of technology (even ignoring pork boondoggles like Morton Thiokol in Utah)
.
Time to ax the Shuttle program. Give NASA some real money. Move the little experiments to the various LEO launches on small vehicles. Use heavy lift rockets like Energiya and Ariane while NASA designs and contracts out a US design, perhaps an updated SaturnV or something. To hell with jingoistic crap like "giving up the space race to the Russians and Europeans" -- let's not cut off our noses to spite our faces.And let's not forget that space travel for humans is still very much an experimental thing. "There be dragons -- expect to die!" There still will be no dearth of volunteers for astronaut positions.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
One of the most important recommendations the report made, and which is provoking little comment, is that NASA needs to separate the shuttle's operational managment from the shuttle's safety management.
That is, the people who decide "This machine can/can't fly even if we do/don't fix that widget" ought not to be the same people who are responsible for flying the thing. This especially applies to approving safety waivers.
The model to follow is that of the U.S. military. Operations is in one command, R&D is in another, and the people who say a plane is safe to fly are not the people who get paid to fly it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Well, technically a politician is supposed to agregate the information of said experts and make a decision. The inherit flaw is in PAC's and campaign financing. A political system that runs of money/donations is a flawed one.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
God - do we have to have this argument AGAIN on slashdot?
The problem with private enterprise is that it expects rewards from its funding - rewards that generate $$$, not scientific knowledge or nationalistic pride, but cold hard cash. The problem with space is that there is as-of-yet, no viable way to make $$$ out there. Tourism is the only industry that's already made a start in space, but its first steps were shaky, it relied on a publically-funded infrastructure, and it has yet to progress any further. As for mining, there is nothing up there that we can't get down here for cheaper. Some might point to the He-3 resources on the moon, but these are not needed at all except for in undeveloped nuclear fusion technology.
I suppose there is one commercial industry that has been succesful in space: the sattelite communication/telecommunications industry. However, private interests are not going to progress beyond the sorts of sattelites we are currently flying, let alone go anywhere near manned flight on there own.
In conclusion, I would argue that private interest is not an "easier beast to summon." In fact, I would say that it is much more difficult to raise funds for space exploration through private means than it is to get public support. A space race with China would generate the neccesary support very quickly, and we might start seeing some projects come to fruition rather than being nearly completed only to be scrapped for going over-budget, and then being restarted a few years later to satiate the military-industrial complex. The only alternative that I can see having any success in space other than publically-funded programs is philanthropy. If some very rich people got together and started offering more prizes similar to the X-prize, we could see some actual development. It worked in aviation, the only thing holding it back for space is that the prizes need to be that much bigger to make it worthwhile.
In short, space exploration's only hope lies in publically funded programs or philanthropic rewards, not in the commercial exploitation of resources that don't exist.
The data is lost huh? Then build a Saturn VI!
here's my case:
1. Cryogenic turbo pump design and reliability has improved significantly since the early 70's
2. all the data we need is just lying around in space museums and outdoor rocket gardens. i think i saw something on the net that had an SV laying on it's side. not to mention recoverd apollo capsuls.
3 Materials technology both metalurgical and especially composite is well in advance of what they had available in the 60's. All we really neeed is the dimensions of this stuff
4. our sensors and digital control devices are much more accurate and faster reacting and can process more I/O.
5. the stages could be made reusable due to advances in materials technology giving us higher strength and lighter weight. with our miniscule electronics we could also have "smart" stages that could recover themselves to pre determined points on the globe.
6. the payload could increased because of he abovementioned wieght savings and improvements in the turbopump/engine design.
Thus we would have a Saturn VI instead of a Saturn V.
Most (American) companies are spending less on R&D these days than they did in the past.
I don't know whether this is due to the recession, or due to an increasing "let's not look beyond next quarter" mentality.
Probably both.
Face it, like the British before us, and the French and Spain before them, we are stagnating, as anyone at the top always does.
We can only hope that China becomes more free and open as it passes us to become the world's next dominant power.
(There are already signs of this happening, albeit somewhat more slowly than most of us would like.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana