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Murphy's Law Rules NASA
3x37 writes "James Oberg, former long-time NASA operations employee, now journalist, wrote an MSNBC article about the reality of Murphy's Law at NASA. Interesting that the incident that sparked Murphy's Law over 50 years ago had a nearly identical cause as the Genesis probe failure. The conclusion: Human error is an inevitable input to any complex endeavor. Either you manage and design around it or fail. NASA management still often chooses the latter."
Someday all decisions will be made by machines. We'll just sit back while they do all the work. Then, no more human error.
My sig would have been a lot cooler if
That's right, blame it all on the Irish. After all, it's not like anyone else ever screwed up...
See what I've been reading.
Why be different than any other management?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
you can't, possibly, have written that with a straight face. can you?
Makes me think of the quote from Armageddon:
Rockhound : You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?
And it will have flaws, no matter how often and thorough you check.
Disclaimer: This opinion was created without the use of any facts
Here's the real reason for NASA and their errors, as quoted by Gordon Cooper a former astronaut.
"Well, you're sitting on top of this rocket, about to be flung into the most hostile environement know to man, and you keep thinking, 'Everything here was supplied by the lowest bidder.'"
Live forever, or die trying.
Summary of The fastest man on Earth:
George Nichols: "The Law's namesake, was Capt. Ed Murphy Jr., a development engineer... Frustrated with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gauge bridges caused him to remark-- 'if there is any way to do it wrong, he will'-- referring to the technician who had wired the bridges. I assigned Murphy's Law to the statement and the associated variations..."
David Hill: "Murphy was kind of miffed off. And that gave rise to his observation: 'If there's any way they can do it wrong, they will.' I kind of chuckled and said, that's the way it goes. Nothing more could be done really."
John Paul Stapp: "we do all of our work in consideration of Murphy's Law. [defined as] the idea that you had to think through all possibilities before doing a test."
Dr. Dana Kilanowski: "at the time I believe Stapp said something like, 'If anything can go wrong he'll do it.' A couple days later there was a press conference in Los Angeles and Stapp said something like, 'it was Murphy's Law -- if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.' [...] I have heard that Murphy claimed he invented Murphy's Law, but Stapp is the one noted for his witticisms, his haikus, and his plays on words."
Ed Murphy: "I didn't tell them that they had positively to orient them in only one direction. So I guess about that time I said, 'Well, I really have made a terrible mistake here, I didn't cover every possibility.' And about that time, Major Stapp says, 'Well, that's a good candidate for Murphy's Law'. I thought he was going to court martial me, but that's all he said. [Stapp reeled off a host of other Laws, and said] 'from now on we're going to have things done according to Murphy's Law'."
Chuck Yaeger: "Look, what you're getting into here is like a Pandora's Box. Goddamn it, that's the same kind of crap...you get out of guys who were not involved and came in many years after."
And in the end it wasn't as extreme a failure as Genesis:
According to Nichols the failure was only a momentary setback --"the strap information wasn't that important anyway," he says -- and regardless good data had been collected from other instruments. The Northrop team rewired the gauges, calibrated them, and did another test. This time Murphy's transducers worked perfectly, producing useable data. And from that point forward, Nichols notes, "we used them straight on" because they were a good addition to the telemetry package. But Murphy wasn't around to witness his devices' success. He'd returned to Wright Field and never visited the Gee Whiz track ever again.
`nuff said...
Note the "law" doesn't just torture NASA exclusively, it just rears its head very visibly in their case.