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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."
Its an oversimplification to say that older technology was used without errors. In fact, its just downright incorrect. Appolo 1 and Appolo 13 both suffered from catastophic failures. Furthermore, the next generation of space vehicles, the shuttle, has had two very significat disasters and reams of other failures.
No, it isn't. The Saturn V rocket was the most complicated and largest system ever built by man at the time and launched without a SINGLE failure for its entire operational life. The vehicles and satellites it carried had problems but the rocket itself never failed.
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Murphy's law has nothing to do with the Irish.
:-)
Anyway, has anyone else ever thought an article is based on a Slashdot post one made? I was thinking about the exact same similarities last week.
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The fact that the Saturn V rockets never blew up doesn't mean they never had problems! There were plenty of things that went wrong. Even in the movie Apollo 13, one of the Saturn V engines malfunctioned during take off. We survive failures in rockets and other critical pieces of technology due not only to pragmatic design but also redundancy. (Also, think about the design of airplanes...triple redundancy on hydrolic lines.)
Also, there was some kind of semi-critical problem in EVERY SINGLE Apollo mission except Apollo 17, the very last one.
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Sure we've been to the moon. But we haven't done a damn bit of fundimental research since then. (A lot of improvements to our unmanned rocket technology have been bought/borrowed/stolen from the Russian program.)
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Very comforting to know how easy it is to wire the safeties on nuclear weapons up backwards.
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"The vehicles and satellites it carried had problems but the rocket itself never failed."
No, but it came damn close. The 'pogo' problem on one of the launches, for example, almost lead to the loss of the Saturn V: if I remember correctly it would have broken up in a few seconds, but one of the engines shut down due to excessive forces and that saved the rocket.
The sad thing is that by the time we launched the last Saturn the worst of the bugs had been resolved, just in time to stop flying them...
Take a look at Chapter 5 of the CAIB Report. You might be especially interested in Section 5.3 - "An Agency Trying To Do Too Much With Too Little." And since you're comparing Apollo era NASA with today's program, look at diagrams 5.3-1 and 5.3-3. In short, the Apollo program enjoyed considerably more funding.