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Sequence of Events During Columbia Mission
applemasker writes "Today's NYT is reporting that NASA managers actively resisted requests from vehicle engineers for on-orbit imagery. This should answer Administrator O'Keefe's question of why no engineers 'spoke up' during the flight. Seems they did; managers just ignored them."
"... managers just ignored them."
The story of an engineer's life.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Engineers make recommendations. Managers disregard them. Things like impressing VPs, etc are way more important to get ahead in an organisation unfortunately.
...is that all of the managers on the mission, including Ms. Ham, have apparently been reassigned or they've retired. The behavior quoted in the article (assuming it's accurate), is inexcusable.
Tim
Do they have pointy hair as well?
Can those managers be charged with manslaughter now?
This sounds like what happens with any career where the management doesn't know as much as the subordinates. As such this should send the message out that when someone tells you that something is a bad idea then you might want to consider why they say its a bad idea. After all how many of us have had our boss(es) tell us to do something that is either technically not possible (for any reason), or is dangerous?
It seems like the high level directors at NASA would like nothing better than for all the hoopla surrounding this to go away. Kind of a "everyone just move along now" attitude.
Unfortunately, there are dead bodies now...
Now what's next? Managers should be expected to listen to engineers???
Here's a BBC story on the same subject.
For those like me who do not wish to register with NYT
then there needs to be total shutdown of space launch operations at NASA until (1) the managers responsible for this are no longer with the agency and (2) safety concerns are met with the proper attention all the way up and down the chain.
This type of sloppy attitude toward potential problems has gotten other federal agencies in enormous trouble in the past. Some of these agencies, like the DOE, have pushed safety back into the light and take it seriously. NASA has yet to do this.
It's sad, really, that what should be the shining star of the federal government turns out to be another sub-par agency, filled with bureaucrats, not technocrats.
This is just another example of one of my favorite statements:
"A bad technical decision is never a good business decision!"
Regardless of the circumstances, a bad technical decision is never good from a business perspective. It never cost less in the long run. A mediocre decision may be a good one because of cost, but a bad one will fail, cost you more, and failure is never good for business. Unfortunately too often managers don't understand this until it's too late.
The panel findings that NASA was starved for funds by congress and the White House. One congress man actually said that "The problems at NASA would still exists even if we gave them a blank check."
No they wouldn't.
The managers are told that they have to fly x number of missions on x number of dollars. If they fly less they get even less money.
Don't blame the managers blame congress and the last couple of Admins. Yes Billy Boy during a time of budget surplus never gave NASA a buget increase.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Taking credit for your subordinates work and filtering the "crazy talk" to your manager... with those two you can be a very successful manager in any organization.
Sadly.
"In God we trust, all others must bring data" - W. Edwards Deming
Do you launch another shuttle mission, have both dock at the space station? Do you set up a moon base? Do you develop a new low-orbit rescue vehicle? Does everyone moonwalk from one shuttle to another? Do we redesign the shuttle to have a safty escape module that can blast loose of the mother ship and safely return to earth?
I bootleg Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
So now they decide to post something besides SCO...I was just getting excited after the last two consecutive stories.
start putting managers on these space flights, you'll be darn sure to start having better safety.
Just look at how China dealt with Y2k. They ordered all airline executives to be in the air over Y2K, so they'd bite it if they didn't clean house.
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Actually, I kind of side with the managers.
What's the point of knowing there's damage on the underside of the shuttle, when it's already up there with no ability to perform a repair or be rescued?
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will find fault with that reasoning, but the only argument that could convince me to change my mind is one that involves a plausible repair senario.
..should send anonymous information to the press when managers ignore there advice under these kind of circumstances.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I was taking the required Technical Communication course in college to finish my engineering degree, a major theme of the class was incidents such as Three Mile Island and the Challenger disaster. The professor said that while the public perception was that management had f***ed up, the engineers had to bear some responsibility because they were unable to adequately communicate the necessary conclusions in a manner that decision makers could understand. And we would look at copies of the memos, and think that, yeah, if the engineers had written more effectively, things may have been different.
In some ways, even though I don't enjoy writing specs and design documents for software (I don't work on mission-critical or life-critical systems), I try to write well, because I figure, "I'm an engineer, and I have a responsibility to do my job as a professional."
And then I read this article, and I think that maybe, after all, it doesn't matter what a competent, professional engineer says or does. I'm just saddened that NASA, an institution I loved growing up, did not change at all after Challenger. I wish I knew the answer.
Actually the military / CIA mislead the manager of the shuttle program about the capabilities of the satellites because he didn't have the required security clearance. He therefore determined that the images wouldn't be of sufficient quality to find a possible problem.
This was in one of the reports from the investigation board.
How about giving them an opportunity to say goodbye to their friends and family?
I'd say that's worth it.
If NASA managers listened to every issue brought forward by each of their thousands of engineers, spaceships would never leave the earth.
It's in each of these engineers best interest to list every problem that could possible occur in the systems they design and maintain. That way if the problem happens in one of their systems, they can cover their ass with paperwork. Just because they issued a low-level memorandum doesn't mean these engineers actually had any level of confidence that the problem would occur. It just meant they were covering their ass.
NASA has an escalation process, if these engineers *really* felt there was a problem, all they had to do was push that button. But to push the button is to put your clout on the line. Push it too often by mistake and you will rightly be taken out of the process. No company or organization can afford an employee that continually cries wolf.
So if anyone is to blame for this, it's not the managers. It's the engineers that wrote memo's about it to cover their ass but didn't think the problem was important enough to push the escalation button.
The managers are so inundated with engineers thinking up possible error scenarios they can't possible take them all seriously. Of course, when a shuttle goes down, those same engineers drag out the paper trail covering their butt and program managers are left to swing.
Congress should be ashamed of this inquiry and so should most of America. Space travel is dangerous. Live with the danger or get out of the business.
I've worked in tech for a while, and it sounds like your typical NASA Manager is about intelligent as a typical Project Manager at a dot-com. I worked at this place where they took the office manager (i.e. receptionist) and made her a PM for a major automotive company with an HQ in Southern California. According to her, they were heavily invested in Sequel Server. Is that like the Matrix Reloaded? Maybe NASA can hire the goatse.cx site admin to run the Shuttle Program. He gets results.
Scott Adams has been pointing out that managers never listen to engineers for years...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Anonymous whistleblowing could lead to a witch hunt that would affect not only you but your co-workers and friends as well. If you whistleblow with your name you risk losing your job. And too much whistleblowering reduce the impact each time leading to less attention being given each subsequent event.
What really needs to change is the culture, engineers need to have more authority than managers.
Shh.
This results in a culture where we promote a weakness (no communication skills) as a virtue (disdain for politics). The only way to change this, I think, is to emphasize writing and communications coursework as well as courses where you learn how not to kill people by leaving a bolt off the diagram.
New York TIMES?!
You think you're better than us?
Us?
U.S.?
U.S.A?
No way!
-John "Soccer Comic" McGurk
I encourage you to read the entire story, which is four pages long. Mr. Rocha appears to have acted in an exemplary manner. He worked with Columbia from the time it was being built and felt very close to that particular shuttle. He witnessed and has reported the "launch fever" on the part of managers, and as soon as he heard about the foam strike, he spent the weekend (does that sound familiar to anyone here?) reviewing the video. He took an actual INTEREST in his work, get it?
Then he wrote the e-mail to the manager at 11:24 pm on Sunday. Sound familiar? Spend all weekend checking it out and when you're SURE, take action. He requested that the astronauts conduct a visual inspection of the impact area. He didn't hear back from his manager (sound familiar?). But he didn't stop there. He and the debris assessment team continued to review it until Tuesday, when he sent another e-mail asking if they could get some satellite images of the damage area. Sounds like a great idea.
It never happened, because management didn't want to play the role of "Chicken Little". Unbelievable. Seven dead astronauts because management couldn't be bothered. But Mr Rocha is a hero, and I hope to shake his hand one day and thank him for his efforts. I also looked for his e-mail address and couldn't find it. I'm amazed he hasn't been fired by now for being a whistleblower. Give it time. If anybody has a work or personal address for him, please share it with me.
Thanks,
RP
Except that without knowing what the extent of the damage is in the first place, it's impossible to determine if it can be repaired in the first place. So perhaps there might have been a plausible repair scenario (or at least the opportunity to do something that didn't involve the death of a shuttle crew), but since no investigation was done while the opportunity was avaliable. NASA might be a godawful bureaucracy, but if you strip away the bureaucrats, you're left with people who have something of a clue and could have worked out something, instead of pretending that the problem didn't exist in the first place.
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
It's the same thing in the computer/IT sector. More and more the management has no technical skills, just business skills. But these people are the ones who decide what technology is best. Why the NASA management wouldn't point a telescope at the Shuttle when engineers felt there was need for more information is beyond me. Most likely it was purely a financial decision.
r t people running around the industry now. But that has nothing to do with the Shuttle and NASA. Those engineers were/are capable of the tasks at hand.
15 years ago, it was very common for technical people to fill management positions up through middle management with the Chief Engineer over seeing all the technical departments and reporting directly to the top level management. Today, we're luck to get technical expertise beyond the department/group managment level.
This isn't a NASA-only problem. It's an industry wide problem. For example, the CSX RailRoad had it's signaling system go down because the computers running all those signals runs Microsoft Windows and got a virus. Who but a non-technical managager would insist Windows be used in a mission critical task like this? This might not be a good example because I have no proof it was a management decision while it very well be a technical moron made the choice and dumb PHB's followed the advice. The choice should not have been followed if a technically savy management existed.
There's also been a dumbing down of the technical sector with all these I-can-click-an-icon-therefore-I'm-a-computer-expe
Does anybody else think that management making technical decisions no longer make them with much regard to input from the engineers anymore?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Did i get that correct?
I can imagine the cover up NASA was trying to do when the Shuttle did burn up.
Everybody played dumb to the press.
How hard was it to take a fucking picture? Or point a telescope at the shuttle? A picture is a thousand words? The people who stoped that from happening should be SHOT!!!
I feel for that poor engineer, I bet if had went over peoples heads he would have been fired.
He probably has a big fat mortgage and two car payments. I could imagine him having a hell of a time trying to find a job.
What's most interesting to me about this story is that both the engineers and the managers were making the best decision based on their perspectives. The engineer's perspective is based on hard facts, information, and analysis. The manager's perspective is based on people issues: money, resource management, risk management, project deadlines, etc.
It's easy in retrospect to criticize managers who didn't want to be a "Chicken Little" or who, upon getting feedback from upper management, called it a "dead issue". But if they had gone ahead with the imaging, and the photos showed no damage and the shuttle had landed safely with no (or insignificant) damage to the wing, their reputation would have suffered. They would have been faulted for allocating valuable resources on something that turned out not to be an issue.
Part of a manager's job includes risk management and resource allocation. This means properly assessing the likelihood and impact of a risk. In this case, I would suggest that management considered the 'cost' of pursuing further investigation to be higher than the 'likelihood * impact' factor of doing nothing. They have probably made the same decision many times before, successfully, which would encourage them to make the same decision again. Only this time, they were wrong -- the statistics caught up with them.
-Thomas
RTFA!
NASA acknowledged that if they'd known by the seventh day, they could have organized a rescue mission.
No matter how many time I read about this accident, it still sickens me.
I suppose the Times must have felt like they needed to recycle month old news for some reason. The report came out a month ago. You don't exactly have to dig through the report for a month to find this stuff; it is among the kind of thing most highlighted in the report.
I suppose next month we will get a news article explaining that the World Trade Center is no longer standing.
'nuff said.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Need Another Seven Astronauts!
(Those ears stick out pretty far on Yoda, that must hurt like a beeeeotch!)
Without taking away from the seriousness of the situation or making light of it I'm going to offer a different spin if you will. Devil's advocate...
I'm very accustomed to the whole technical minded vs the suits dilemma. But... I can believe that there is a sort of symbiosis that takes place between the two types of people.
Without the managers coming out with thier guns a slinging making hasty decisions, people like us wouldn't normally achieve some of the feats that we do. Let alone try. I'm not saying that this is what I firmly believe but is it possible that the struggle itself between the two kinds of people is what propells an idea into reality? Possibly even ideas that would never even be given consideration? Surly there might be danger but is it acceptable?
Though what I had just said doesn't necessarily apply to all the nuances surrounding the situation. But does anyone agree or disagree?
I wonder what it would be like without any of the friction I just described. Just a thought.
I believe with the advent of first post, we discovered new ways to think and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts of mind. Why is it that people are so afraid of it ? What is it about it that scares people so deeply ?
Because they are afraid that there is more to reality than they have ever confronted. That there are doors that they are afraid to go in and they don't want us to go in there either because if we go in, there we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
When the MsBlast worm hit our place in August and I saw the Slashdot story, I saw a spike in our call volume about two minutes before. I immediately notified my manager and told her that something needed to be done. She said, "huh, what's slashdot?" called her manager and said an employee got a message off some unauthorized site. Then she promptly did nothing.
We are still taking calls about that virus, and the bass ackwards crap they did to remedy the fallout. Managers are paid to make a team go in a direction and be productive. Not to ignore the people they "manage". Part of being productive is knowing that you listen to your team.
I can kind of sympathize with dumb managers though. If everyone who thought there was a major issue came to them and bitched their ears off, they'd never get anything done. Adding another layer between the management and team seems asinine too, because inevitably there just become too many layers to communicate through. As evidenced in the article, where Mr. Rocha ignored protocol and wrote directly to the head honcho of NASA (god forbid!). I think it goes to reinforce the fact that business managers and people who go to business school to become managers are worthless. Moving up through the ranks and cutting your teeth is the only way to find a good manager who will consistently know when a team member is talking out there ass or should worry when confronted.
Oh, well, I guess one day I'll have seniority, over somebody, somewhere, somehow.
Welcome your new Slashdot overlord non-sig.
We'd better RUN to the hardware store for a padlock to lock the barn door!!!! Seriously though, you'd have thought they would have learned a few things from the Challenger tragedy...like LISTEN TO YOUR ENGINEERS' CONCERNS!!! What's that saying: "Those who do not learn from their mistakes are destined to repeat them". What's even more whacked is they transferred or retired the people who screwed up, when you'd think they'd be the ones you'd WANT to remain. Why? Because you can be DANM SURE they'd never screw up again. Instead, there's a whole NEW group of managers to F**K up for the first time all over again!
How many times at NASA over the years did a non-management engineer raise his voice in concern over and over for something he was having "nightmares" only to find the shuttle (or capsule) return to earth safely?
So an engineer saw a problem and was concerned. My question is how often does this happen. If after every launch there are 100 engineers who noticed a potential problem, then I'd have ignored this too (along with the 99 other potential problems that didn't kill columbia) If enginneers almost never see a potential problem then this should have been taken seriously.
Others have pointed out that there is an esclation process for problems belived to be serious, and that wasn't followed. In hind site it should have been, but they didn't have hind site to work with then, so we have to be realistic i our expectations.
Gvie me a munis one, I dseevre it. I'm a bad bowy.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Part of the problem is the damage caused to NASA by years of budget cuts. I saw this first hand. Due to a lack of funds, NASA adopted an attitude that sustaining engineering and operations costs could be substantially reduced by avoiding change whenever possible. Just keep the current system running with as little maintenance as possible. If nothing changes, you can get rid of most of the people who used to design, test, document and maintain the systems. If there is a problem with a system, you don't find the root cause and fix it, you develop a work-around. If new technology offers a better way to do something, you ignore it because the old system is "good enough" and you no longer have the money, infrastructure and people needed for major design changes and new systems development. The organization gets reduced to a caretaker for the engineering accomplishments of previous generations. It has just enough money and people to maintain the status quo.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The managers are told that they have to fly x number of missions on x number of dollars. x = 5;
Yes flying 5 missions on 5 dollar is a real challenge.
I am unsure as to how it works in America, but here in Australia this type of behaviour would result in the managers responsible being imprisoned for manslaughter if not murder.
We have an organisation here called 'Worksafe.' Basically if a business is suffering from an unusual amount of injuries or a death occurs on the job, the worksafe assessors come in and try to find out WHY there are so many injuries. Why the death occurred. If it is shown that the managers where negligent in their duty to provide a safe working environment, then they can, and will, be charged with criminal negligence.
I am not stubborn. I am right!
They should be sent to jail!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I read the entire Columbia report, and this article. Although I don't think we should always look for a person to blame after an accident, this was such a case of gross mismanagement that I really hope both Ham and Schomberg get at least a few months in "Club Fed" for their actions. Ham had future launch dates taking priority over her current mission. She quashed three requests for imaging personally, primarily because it would be the admittance of a problem that would throw the next mission off schedule. Schomberg on the other hand was just a poor engineer. He spouted off all week that he was the "EXPERT". Without doing a single calculation or having a shred of evidence, he just knew the Shuttle was safe regardless of what others said because he was the "expert". Sounds more like a petulant child to me.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Yeah, everything is a huge conspiracy to make Bush look like he's responsible for the economy, international relations and the state of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Columbia was mostly a science experiment mission. I heard a talk a month ago from the Principal Investigators of two experiments. Because these both had cameras and telemetry, they each returned 90% of their results. They were hoping to retrieve the apparatus for final analysis, but the pieces recovered after the accident weren't too useful. However, one of the experiment had got 5% additional results when a disk platter was forensically read after the accident.
Both investigators said the astronauts were crucial to the success of their experiments. Although they were supposed to be mostly automatic, Murphy's law intervened, and the astronauts had to help. One astronaut even devoted several hours of her recreation time to fixing a busted valve (The ground crew had stayed up 96 hours straight working on a solution). All of the ground material was impounded for two months after the accident to rule our experimental causes of the accident.
One result is of immediate use to NASA. It was a study of extinguishing fires with a new kind of water mist that could only be studied in microgravity. Since the prediction was successful, this means that water-based extinguishers could replace chemical extinguishers in space and on earth in more situations.
Overall 60% of the results on the entire missionwere successfully returned. Slightly more may be retrieved through forensics. I was surprised to hear this high a success.
It was not decided yet whether there would be a collective publication of their successful results as a memorial to the mission. They will of course publish in their respective journals.
Get real.
Government employees and Government Unioned Employees are rarely touchable and THEY KNOW IT. It is a seniority based system that does not support any contrary opinion from within or from without. It is rarely accountable, and actively hostile to such attempts. It takes a huge flaming unignorable disaster before something does happen (no offense intended). Even then you usually end up with the very same people in nearly identical, if not just renamed positions causing the very same situations to arise all over again.
Face it, NASA will never improve until nearly everyone above "flunkie" is thrown out.
You cannot throw money at this system and expect it to fix. We have been doing that everyday with the school system and it has the same result. The administrators act like an aristocracy, have laws to protect them, and force by indirect means to enforce their will.
The really sad part is how much money you and I will pay so these lard asses can retire, and usually at levels unheard of in the private sector. Hell some will probably get fame from it.
Throw them out, and if found to have willfully impeded an investigation that might have revealed the danger put them in JAIL.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Something I've been thinking about for some time...
It's hard to believe that the NASA managers ALL were indifferent to or ignorant of the potential damage to the shuttle. If you're an engineer, you can run through the numbers in your head in about 5 seconds flat: mass x velocity x surface area= pressure per square inch.
If you know anything about the shuttle, you know that the tiles are fragile and subject to fracture on impact (in fact a major worry always has been what happens if the Shuttle hit a piece of space junk.)
And if you know anything about the shuttle project, you also know that the crew had limited ability to fix a lot of things that might go wrong after the shuttle lifts off the pad.
So what if you're a manager with the big view and the big leather chair and an engineer or several come to you with concerns about the impact on the wing?
And you do the math in your head and remember that there are no spare tiles on board and basically if the wing has been holed, the crew cannot be saved?
Choice 1: Raise the alarm, go through an agonizing several weeks of total public panic/crisis until the shuttle runs out of food, fuel and/or life support and watch the crew die in front of the world? or,
Choice 2: Put a lid on it and let the shuttle go through its mission, hoping that a miracle might happen and the damage is not serious enough to cause breakup on reentry?
So the question is, what do you do?
___________
In other words, what NASA management knew it had only two choices and chose #2? and if they did, was that the wrong choice?
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
WTF.
Parent post is currently listed as Flamebait. It's not flamebait in the least.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
So, they either still have their jobs, or they have retired with pensions? Tell that to the astronauts' families.
These people should have faced charges for manslaughter. At the very least, they should have been fired with prejudice, and stripped of their pensions.
How about allowing the crew time to contact their familes before they die?
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
The better liars are promoted, and the ones that are less skillful get caught.
"Why the NASA management wouldn't point a telescope at the Shuttle when engineers felt there was need for more information is beyond me."
It's quite clear from the report.
The people who were in charge of the telescope to take such a picture, refused to admit to NASA that such resolution was within their capabilities.
They lied because the people making the request lacked security clearance.
Everything is the fault of the top of the company.
That sounds harsh, and incorrect, but if you look at it more carefully it's true.
You at the top may be a good director, but you're not doing your job well if you don't have immediate subordinates that are doing their job right/well.
How do you know if they are? You watch, and you get out in the trenches once in a while to get a true view for yourself of what's going on.
It is no excuse for an executive to say "I didn't realize that such and such was going on".
Look at Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines if you want to see it done right.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Which could have resulted in the same situation as the first one... If they had known about the extent of the tile damage, and thought it bad enough to risk a balls-to-the-wall processing of the next available shuttle (Atlantis), it would have been a horribly bad idea to blindly launch another shuttle without knowing what had happened to the previous one or taking steps to prevent it.
These decisions weren't just made on a 'we don't feel like finding out what happened' basis, the managers were provided earlier studies on foam strikes. These studies, which were all computer models, turned out to be wrong, as they had never been done before in reality. The managers didn't know the studies were wrong...
If the studies had been done in real life before this, they might have known the possible extent of the damage... But even then, a rescue mission was unprecidented, and extremely risky...
/sig
This was NASA's chance to regain its former status. If the problem had been discovered, the nation would have been in the grips of the attempts to the solve the problem. Provided the threat to the astronauts' lives was made clear to the populace, a successful return would have guaranteed that NASA would receive the public support and possibly fnding that it needs to continue its exploration of space.
However, the engineers were ignored, the problem was serious, and tragedy was the result. NASA missed its chance to reclaim its glory days.
The issue is not "did NASA engineers raise concerns" but did they raise concerns above the level that usually triggers a more serious review. I am sure that on every single shuttle mission there were engineers that raised concerns about every single glitch, out-of-tolerance reading, or unusual occurence, etc. This is a good thing. It is also a good thing that other engineers and managers make informed cost-benefit decisions to either pursue, study, or ignore any raised concerns.
Hindsight is 20-20. Nobody remembers all the prior events in which engineers raised concerns that were ignored and nothing happened. Don't forget this was not the first time that insulation had fallen off the external tank. As an engineer myself, I know I can come up with all manner of "potential concerns." As an older engineer, I know that many of those concerns can easily fail a cost-benefit analysis or prove to be groundless on further study.
Tuning the process of raising and dispatching concerns is very hard -- being overly cautious is as damaging as being overly risky. It is especially hard with the extremely low sample sizes and highly complex systems that NASA faces when managing the shuttle. Personally, I am surprised that the shuttle is as reliable as it is.
I hope that NASA can keep flying because it is the only way that humanity can get the experience needed for truly reliable space flight in the future.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Say they did have some knowledge while in orbit that the shielding was damaged, and that Columbia probably could not come back. Their choices were extremely limited.
The crew didn't have the tools, training, materials, etc. to do any repairs in flight.
The arm wasn't installed for this shuttle flight.
There were only two eva capable space suits on board. The only eva training the crew had was to try manual methods of closing the cargo bay doors if the automatic methods failed.
The shuttle apparently didn't have enough fuel to reach & dock with the space station.
Would they have had any choices other than:
a. Tell the crew the situation, and let the crew decide whether to take a chance.
b. Breaking every single shuttle launch safety rule, try to launch another shuttle with 1-2 crew, and a bunch of space suits, before Columbia ran out of consumables.
Neither choice would look good to me.
OK. Damn, you're good.
It appears most of the other replies were of the, "If they'd know they could have pulled a repair kit and EVA proceedure out of their ass" variety.
Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN SCHWARTZ
Over and over, a projector at one end of a long, pale-blue
conference room in Building 13 of the Johnson Space Center showed a
piece of whitish foam breaking away from the space shuttle Columbia's
fuel tank and bursting like fireworks as it struck the left wing.
In twos and threes, engineers at the other end of the cluttered room
drifted away from their meeting and watched the repetitive, almost
hypnotic images with deep puzzlement: because of the camera angle, no
one could tell exactly where the foam had hit.
It was Tuesday, Jan. 21, five days after the foam had broken loose
during liftoff, and some 30 engineers from the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration and its aerospace contractors were having the first
formal meeting to assess potential damage when it struck the wing.
Virtually every one of the participants ? those in the room and some
linked by teleconference ? agreed that the space agency should
immediately get images of the impact area, perhaps by requesting them
from American spy satellites or powerful telescopes on the ground.
They elected one of their number, a soft-spoken NASA engineer, Rodney
Rocha, to convey the idea to the shuttle mission managers.
Mr. Rocha said he tried at least half a dozen times to get the space
agency to make the requests. There were two similar efforts by other
engineers. All were turned aside. Mr. Rocha (pronounced ROE-cha) said a
manager told him that he refused to be a "Chicken Little."
The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt e-mail message
that concluded, "I consider it to be a dead issue."
New interviews and newly revealed e-mail sent during the fatal Columbia
mission show that the engineers' desire for outside help in getting a
look at the shuttle's wing was more intense and widespread than what was
described in the Aug. 26 final report of the board investigating the
Feb. 1 accident, which killed all seven astronauts aboard.
The new information makes it clear that the failure to follow up on the
request for outside imagery, the first step in discovering the damage
and perhaps mounting a rescue effort, did not simply fall through
bureaucratic cracks but was actively, even hotly resisted by mission
managers.
The report did not seek to lay blame on individual managers but focused
on physical causes of the accident and the "broken safety culture"
within NASA that allowed risks to be underplayed. But Congress has
opened several lines of inquiry into the mission, and holding
individuals accountable is part of the agenda.
In interviews with numerous engineers, most of whom have not spoken
publicly until now, the discord between NASA's engineers and managers
stands out in stark relief.
Mr. Rocha, who has emerged as a central figure in the 16 days of the
Columbia's flight, was a natural choice of his fellow engineers as a
go-between on the initial picture request. He had already sent an e-mail
message to the shuttle engineering office asking if the astronauts could
visually inspect the impact area through a small window on the side of
the craft. And as Mr. Rocha was chief engineer in Johnson Space Center's
structural engineering division and a man with a reputation for
precision and integrity, his words were likely to carry great weight.
"I said, `Yes, I'll give it a try,' " he recalled in mid-September, in
the course of five hours of recent interviews at a hotel near the space
center.
In its report, the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board
spoke of Mr. Rocha, 52, as a kind of NASA Everyman ? a typical engineer
who suspected that all was not well with the Columbia but could not save it.
"He's an average guy as far as personality, but as far as his
engineering skills, he's a very, very detail-oriented guy," said D
If this happened in Japan there would have been suicides galore. Ah, the Japanese.. so emotional.
Knowledge contaminates and subverts all the hard work you put into optimistic reports and jubilant sales pitches. Fear knowledge, because even the suspicion "he might have known" will reduce your status from "successful executive" or even "visioneer" to "goddam liar".
Billy boy didn't write the budgets, Congress did. If Clinton had tried to increase funding to NASA, Congress would have had a fit on how he was wasting money. You might want to also consider the time and money spent by Congress on investigating/impeaching/impeading Clinton every way they could. Now that we have a Republican Congress and Republican President, they sure are doing a bang up job.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will find fault with that reasoning, but the only argument that could convince me to change my mind is one that involves a plausible repair senario.
First option: power down everything that can be and ride it out until a rescue shuttle can be launched. They had just about enough time to pull that off had the photos been obtained promptly.
Retarget Russian Progress supply mission to instead take supplies to shuttle so that they could hold out longer for rescue. There was a Progress mission in final prep for launch to ISS at the time.
Uh, not sure why I'm replying to an AC, but...
I have to ask, is that sarcasm or serious post?
Bush *is* responsible for just those things to a large degree. He is the one with the final authority over what USA does regarding those things. He may not do most decision details, and he may have his hands tied in some issues, but in the end he has to give the final approval and therefore bear the final responsibility, doesn't he?
Bush was a business manager and MBA, and look at the spectacular job he is doing of bolloxing up our economy, educational system, and world reputation.
If the lawyers get shot first in the revolution, BHBs should be next.
Does that fact that I worked at IBM and Sun show through? %-/
sPh
Where are my mod points when I need them.
Work for the Bush Admin, do you?
Yeah, and in this case, it was a pointy-titted witch.
Oh yeah. Go read the article.
Let the shits reap what they have sown.
Well, not really. If they were to reap what they have sown, we'd have to try them for murder and give them the death penalty.
Posting who and where they are would at least serve as a warning to asshat bureaucrats everywhere if we don't go the criminal charges route.
OTOH, if the Times is right and the managers do go to jail, it might serve to rectify the problem that Feynman first fingered back when the Challenger blew up. That will be something shuffling the NASA management won't achieve.
"Ah, middle management."
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I've just been reading "What do you care what other people think" by Richard Feynman, and it covers some of his life during the Challenger investigation. And it was the same then as it is now...The field techs and engineers saying "This is really dangerous" and the Suits in management saying "But it worked before, why is it not safe now?!?!". It is a sad story about our Western Civilization that communication between the top and bottom of companies is so bad it is non-existant. If people in Management went and read the Toffler's Future Shock, and the books that come after it, they would understand why it is so important esp. in today's ultra-fast communication age that the heirarchy between the top and bottom of companies be flattened.
...who happily works for a company where the management *are* engineers and still to engineering work, and thus will listen to their workers.
Of course, if it was just money, it might not be that important...but PEOPLE DIED because managment didn't listen...and every day PEOPLE DIE because management continues to be def to the information comming from below.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I do blame the managers and I do blame congress. I blame NASA for failing to be truthful in it's own cost and safety reports. I blame Congress for not providing sufficient oversight and for forcing sub-par designs on NASA in order to appease pork barrel political hand-outs.
Also, I fail to see how you can blame "Billy boy" when he was busy fighting off impeachment and harrassment by a Republican congress when GBush I didn't do diddly for NASA either.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Why is this so hard to understand? Engineers are failure oriented. We look for ways to break stuff, and then plan to mitigate its breakage. We always look at the worst case scenario. I am an engineer, and I know the words, "Yeah, it won't break" have never passed my lips unless accompanied with several volumes of caveats.
Face it folks, engineers are sky-is-falling-folks. We could stand to filter ourselves a little bit to gain some credibility.
"Yeah, the engineers say something bad is going to happen, but they say that every day. Shall we launch, then? Okay, good to go."
I mean, if you say every single day, the world is going to end, and then one day it actually does, did you, in fact, predict it?
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Is this a minor point of English, or is there a technical distinction between the terms "on orbit" and "in orbit"? I don't recall hearing the former term until relatively recently in our space program.
If the general public thinks spaceflight is routine and without risk, they are more niave than I thought.
/sig
It appears most of the other replies were of the, "If they'd know they could have pulled a repair kit and EVA proceedure out of their ass" variety.
Making the attempt, *ANY* attempt, is better than sitting around with your thumb up your ass hoping the problem goes away. Bubble-gum, baling wire, and balls has solved more problems than PHB wishful thinking. It sure as hell beats dying.
NASA, following the board's recommendation, has reached agreements with outside agencies to take images during every flight. And 11 of the 15 top shuttle managers have been reassigned, including Ms. Ham, or have retired.
Well, all I can say it that it can only be a plus that these incompetent managers were reassigned (to cleaning toilets hopefully) and/or retired.
When you have the lives of people in your hands paying attention to detail is a strength, not a weakness!
It is a sad story about our Western Civilization that communication between the top and bottom of companies is so bad it is non-existant.
It's not that communication is non-existant, it's that the "suits" don't want to hear anything that either challenges the fiscal bottom line, or what they learned in business school.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
When you say, every year, there is a 6% chance of equipment failure resulting in loss of life, and then, 17 years later, it actually does, did you, in fact, predict it?
Managers want certainty. Engineers want reality. Reality does not provide certainty, so the engineers won't provide certainty. The only way to obtain the illusion of certainty (which is what ALL human beings want, IMHO) is for the managers to denigrate and ignore the engineers.
The Question: Can those managers be charged with manslaughter now?
Says Bladernr:
I'm not to sure about that. I know it doesn't apply, but the law in Oregon is:
This is part of the Oregon Revised StatutesTo me, if it is as simple as the managers telling the engineers who should know to go away, then it is criminal negligence. The guy I called at the county law library said that, in court, "criminal negligence" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as it does on the street.
Futher, (10) "Criminal negligence" or "criminally negligent," when used with respect to a result or to a circumstance described by a statute defining an offense, means that a person fails to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the result will occur or that the circumstance exists. The risk must be of such nature and degree that the failure to be aware of it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation. [1971 c.743 7; 1973 c.139 .] This foaming mass comes from Chapter 161 of the ORS, so I don't know if it applies to the laws in Chapter 163, the chapter that defines criminally negligent homicide.
According to Lawinfo, "Negligence is always assessed having regards to the circumstances and to the standard of care which would reasonably be expected of a person in similar circumstances. " Futher from Lawinfo, "Gross negligence is 'Any action or an omission in reckless disregard of the consequences to the safety or property of another.
In view of this, I'd say that being a calous moron could get you in trouble.
Making something perfectly safe or as safe as it can be made is not always sensible. People take unnecessary risks all the time for money and thrills, including astronauts. Insisting on perfect safety would be insanely expensive and boring.
But, speaking personally, If someone didn't do something that they could have, just to save a tiny fraction of the total project cost or to save face, I would want heads to roll. I mean that literally.
Blaming a "broken safety culture" for this is a cheap, shitty excuse. Yes, there is corporate responsibility, but there is a personal responsibility problem too. The power to say yes or no is not something to be taken lightly. Don't professional engineers have to take personal responsibility for their work?Whatever else happens, we must be careful not to make managing inherantly risky endeavors like space travel so risky that good people will back off. I really don't know where that line should be drawn.
I'm guessing that these turkeys won't be charged with anything. Even if they do get fired they will probably be able to get another management job.
I do know one thing for sure. If I don't get on with my day I will miss the laundry-mat and then I'll be charged with criminally negligent stinkiness for sure. Besides, all this law stuff making my head hurt.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Just because most people treat risk analysis like some grade school math problem doesn't mean that there hasn't been lots of research on how to do proper risk analyses for complex systems. It isn't simple, but you can do a rigorous risk analysis based on uncertain information. Such an analysis would show which missing information is contributing the largest amount of uncertainty to the end result. In this case, the largest uncertainty was "WHERE DID THE FOAM HIT". Given that this most basic uncertainty was never resolved until much later, there was no way that a proper analysis could have said with any certainty as to the safety of the Columbia given the foam strike.
"We think the foam was this big, we think it didn't hit a critical tile and we think our computer program is too pessimistic so the shuttle is safe" is utter and complete BULLSHIT. It doesn't matter how many numbers you wrap around those words. A bullshit perspective is still bullshit. And no real engineering manager would have let the Lockheed engineers get away with presenting the crappy analysis report. I have another post from a Feburary shuttle story about this.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Sounds like a personal problem....
What good is a double standard if you can't enforce it?
I saw her report and think she should be fired for this BS ....... friggin bureaucrats....
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
In what it says about organizational dynamics. What's most interesting to me is to see what sometimes happens in big corporations happen to NASA. These are my own observations, not a scientific study. But it seems like the same qualities that make a company or organization great sometimes disappear when they arrive at bigdom, where ever that is in their growth cycle. NASA didn't achieve greatness with a bunch of mid-level political managers. They came in after NASA was an institution. They weren't part of the organizational history.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Here is the direct google link to the story for anyone who cares:
Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
I'm afraid they're largely more naive than you initially thought. Most people have no real clue how dangerous spaceflight still is right at the moment- NASA's large success rate on things has people believing it's no more dangerous than an airline flight, albeit much, much more expensive.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
And here is a Linky for the keyboard-challenged people.
Seastead this.
He eventually did call. I'm embarassed to admit that I posted a suggestion to read the entire story before I had read the entire story. I realized that after the fact and was ashamed
It gets even worse than that; when the chips were down, Rodney Rocha cut and ran just like every-damned-else-body:
Bottom line: Rodney Rocha is every bit the cock-sucking whore that his managers were.I thought about this shortly after the disaster and have never heard any mention of it elsewhere: I read somewhere that Columbia was "out of range" of the International Space Station so it would not have been possible to use it to save them.
Assuming the imaging had been done, and the wing flaw identified in time to consider alternatives, wouldn't it have been possible to de-orbit ISS to a level within reach of a rendezvous? Sure, it woul have cost lots of money later to send up more fuel to boost ISS back up, but money is cheaper than human lives.
The only 'perspective' that should have mattered is the safety of that crew! If ANYONE believed that they might be in danger, they should have been heard...DAMN THE EXPENSE!!!! When lives are at stake you should ALWAYS err on the side of caution! This reeks of the Dominoes pizza thing a few years ago where they had a '30 minute' delivery guarantee. Some pinhead bean counter had actually figured out that one delivery person would DIE per million pizzas delivered! When one finally DID die the public's outrage was so great that they eliminated tghe guarantee. How come it only took a pizza place but one accident to fix THEIR problem, while NASA still hasn't learned after Challenger?
Engineers in the real world try to make things work. The biggest problem with this is managers who share your beliefs who believe that problems can be wished away by managerial fiat.
The escalation you whine about was blocked by the action of a bureaucrat at the wrong place and the wrong time, and people died.
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a business process problem and in general, the solution is finding management like you and terminating it and putting procedures in place which will make future managers of the type you support disappear. This is just as important as increasing the budget, because it makes sure that the new money goes into solving the real problems, not into management perks or bureaucratic empire building. The purpose of an organization is to get things done. To fulfill this purpose in a new technology organization which means making new things, the engineers must be supported by management. The engineers are the people who have to solve the problems. The proper place of management is to give them the tools and to fight for budget and priorities with upper management. Any other managerial function in an technology R&D organization that isn't concerned with sales and marketing is secondary at best and parasitic at worst.
Once upon a time, there was a political system whose management believed the country's problems could be solved by bureaucratic edict instead of with people finding out what the problems really were at an empirical level and solving them. The Soviet Union failed its reality check, just like NASA has repeatedly. The Soviet Union no longer exists. Perhaps it's time for NASA to follow it.
Space travel is dangerous. Live with the danger or get out of the business.
Ships were once dangerous. Automobile travel was once dangerous. Airplanes were once dangerous. Living in the America was once dangerous. Every new human domain has been paid for in blood. The problems were solved and now, kids can play outside in California suburbs without fear of being eaten by predators, they can fly in airliners without fear of following the trail of the Challenger astronauts.
The shuttle is not an example of how to deal with the dangers of space travel. Since it was designed, there have been 30 years of aerospace research and development. Can a new earth to LEO vehicle be designed with safety comparable to the DC-3? I think it's time to find out. Perhaps it can't be done, but we can't find out unless it's tried.
The DC-3 was a lot safer than anything that came before it. The modern jet airliner of today is a hell of a lot safer than the DC-3. It's called engineering progress, and that progress happens because engineers figure out what the problems are and their managers support them in getting the resources to implement the solutions. Not because PHMs attack them because they're saying things they don't want to hear.
Space travel is dangerous because Congress won't appropriate the funds to do what needs to be done to make it safe. This is largely because NASA management has not been able to make a case for it that Congress can understand. Even at the level of "if we don't, our astronauts will keep raining down on your constituents in barbecued chunks". Where is the engineering incompetence in this?
Where are the program directors with the integrity to say "We need this amount of money to put humans safely into space. If you won't give it to us, then you'll have to find other people willing to kill astronauts in order to give you guys good PR."
Either Congress should come up with the funds to develop a vehicle whose design takes into account what has been learned in the last 30 years or admit that America can't afford a real space program and leave the field to the private sector, the Indians, and the Chinese.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I don't think I need to discuss how rare that is.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The Shuttle design is 30 years old. We've learned what we can from it and it's time to take what we've learned and build something safer. The fact that there are people crazy enough to fly it doesn't mean we should let them. If the Shuttle stays in the air, it's going to kill people for no good reason. The place for the Shuttle fleet is in the National Air and Space museum, not earth orbit.
Sending people up again in it just to discover another lethal failure mode is pointless. Did the Wright Brothers fly their original plane for 30 years just to find out how many different ways a rev 0.1 release can kill somebody?
Tech Public Policy stuff
The division of work between engineers and managers is supposed to bring efficiency through specialization. Engineers are supposed to concentrate on technology while managers are the socially-oriented people who are more proficient at "people skills" such as communication.
A manager shouldn't need to understand the technology and an engineer shouldn't need to be a good communicator. But it appears, as has been pointed out, that managers only communicate well among themselves, so engineers are expected to learn to communicate with them.
What I want to know is, what's the use of managers then?
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Security was never breached.
These days we hear about security breaches all the time. It is good to learn that there are a few places left where security is taken seriously.
Always remember that breaching security may put lives at risk.
This is an oversimplification, but murder is killing with intent, manslaughter is killing due to reckless conduct, criminally negligent homicide is death resulting from negligence -- normally more than ordinary negligent sloppiness, but no real intent to harm. there is also something called involuntary manslaughter that i think in most places means vehicular homicide. if you're curious, the various "degrees" of murder mean all sorts of different things besides what we see on Law & Order. iirc these distinctions within conduct that is all murder were introduced to soften the application of the death penalty many years ago.
the laws vary from state to state, and the feds have there own rules. thus it is hard to say what *the* law is here. regardless nothing i've seen rises to the level of criminally negligent homicide. a well-known criminal case was brought against Ford corporation for the Pinto fuel system design -- the jury acquitted.
NASA itself should be held liable and punished in civil court. singling out a few "rogue" managers as responsible is exactly what NASA wants, and a peculiar way to deal with a defective management structure. however significant punitive damages would make a statement about the agency's culpability. however, it may be legally difficult to pursue such claims -- another problem that needs fixing.
unsurprisingly it is pretty much impossible for astronauts to get excess life insurance from private companies -- especially now. thus it may be worth giving the standard federal and/or military benefits a second look rather than opening a trust fund seeking private donations after each disaster. NASA should look after its own.
this all assumes NASA is truly culpable, a judgment best withheld until all the evidence has been collected and digested, not splashed piecemeal across the headlines (much though i love NYT).
GBush I didn't do diddly for NASA either.
Actually, Bush Sr. proposed a manned mission to Mars. Would have been quite an exciting endeavor, but the public today just lacks the imagination to support such a program, unlike during the Apollo era.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
No big, angry announcement, though. There probably should have been.
You make it sound like the goddamned hippies have been so sucessful. Good way to pass responsibility away from the people who actually make and implement decisions, onto people whose ideas you don't like, but have nothing to do with the cause of your problems.