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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."
...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
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.
Engineers make recommendations. Managers disregard them. Things like impressing VPs, etc are way more important to get ahead in an organisation unfortunately.
In a "normal" work environment, the corporate food chain annoys those of us with a clue (ie, non-management). Just one of the hassles they pay us to put up with. "Why did this project fail?" "Because you killed the single most important subproject associated with it" "Well, get to work on that, and don't let this happen again!" (mimes masturbating while walking away, disgusted).
In the case of NASA, however, they have a bit more on the line than the bottom line, good hair, and kissing VP ass - They have real, live humans risking their lives every time they climb up into the cockpit.
Sorry, but "the way we do things" doesn't cut it in this situation. I'd personally like to see some people go to prison over this one. They overruled the warnings of people with a clue, and as a result, people died. Totally unacceptible.
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.
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