Entire NASA Safety Board Resigns

identity0 writes "All nine members and two consultants of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel have resigned today, reports CNN. The Panel was responsible for advising NASA on the safety of its spacecraft and facilities, and was set up in 1967 following the Apollo 1 fire. Recently, it had been criticized by the Congressional investigation into the Columbia accident. Here is the NASA press release, and the official home page of the ASAP."

Comments

reorganization?

[zonx lebaam]

A resignation letter that says "we have a lot of hard work in front of us"? Perhaps they aren't resigning from their jobs but merely from the board. Perhaps when the reorganization takes place they will return to doing exactly what they were doing before? This article seems to be saying something that you've got to read between the lines.

Re:Hmmm

[rekkanoryo]

You have to consider something though. What if these people aren't capable of cleaning up their mess--what if they screwed it up so bad they can't possibly fix it? It's not entirely impossible to do, after all.

Re:Hmmm

[sahrss]

What if they were not *allowed* to do their job well? That's a good reason to resign as a group, if management won't let you do your job...

challenger statistics

[morcheeba]

The Morton Thiokol presentations regarding the O-rings were utter crap. Edward Tufte has an excellent deconstruction of their major slides, and shows how little information they contiained. He redrew the graphs, and showed that it was almost certain that the rings would fail at the Challenger's launch temperature.

The link I gave is just a summary & leaves out some parts - the original graph was organized by serial number, not launch temperature, and is filled with cutesy pictures of rockets (chartjunk in Tufte terminology). The new graph shows temperature vs. problems-found-on-recovered-orings. The Challengetr's launch temperature, 40 degrees F, is highlighted at the left of the graph, showing how different this one was versus all others.

The book has a much better presentation, and it's an excellent excellent book. This example is something that I think back to when I make any presentation ... a good chart could have saved lives.

Re:Looks Like NASA Admin. O'Keefe Engineered This

[DerekLyons]

When Congress talks about the "NASA Culture", the finger is clearly pointing in his direction. O'Keefe should have resigned ages ago.

Right. A guy that's barely been in office two years is responsible for things whose roots stretch back over a decade.

Can you 'knee-jerk'?

Re:Hmmm

[kevinank]

Reading through the accident report, it appears that the current head of the safety group did resign a couple of years ago over safety concerns after NASA decided to start outsourcing more of its basic operations without adequate secondary checks. (He had been a NASA project manager, and after his resignation in protest, he was rehired to head up the safety group.)

I'm not sure it was clear to the safety personnel that they were doing a bad job. Rather it seems from the description as though the whole internal structure of NASA was constructed so as to give the safety office as little independence and influence as possible. Within that structure it is hard to imagine anyone I know being able to perform a truly critical review of decisions. NASA culture was so steeped in the assumption that safety came first, that no one was given the opportunity to take an objective and systemic look at the integrated system risks.

No one had authority to look at the forest, everyone was forced to inspect the individual trees. By getting bogged down in detail, NASA was incorrectly convinced that the thousands of safety procedures they followed protected them from an anomaly that didn't concern the guys responsible for that subsystem.