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

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'?