NASA Investigates Possible Sabotage by Worker

mytrip writes "NASA said today it is investigating suspected sabotage of a recorder placed on the shuttle Endeavour for delivery to the space station where it will track physical stresses on the orbiting lab."

Comments

Vague

[Joebert]

Talk about a vague story, I bet half the comments on Slashdot in the last 24 hours have more to them than that story did.

Don't look for conspiracy where incompetence

[Anonymous Coward]

can explain the problems. NASA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has killed dozens of our best and brightest people through carelessness, malfeasance, and incompetence. There is no proper oversight and when people screw up, they face zero consequences.

One the one hand, I've no doubt there is a need to take security very seriously there. On the other hand, if you look at how many astronauts have died from terrorists vs how many have died from bureaucracy and bad management, the score is 0 to a few dozen. And yet, none of those managers or bureaucrats or contractors ever underwent any consequences for the negligent deaths they caused.

At least in the private sector, the customers of your space ship flight can sue you if they die in a fireball because some dumbass was too eager to push the go stick or ignored the warnings of the low level engineers. But if it is NASA, you just get a weepy eyed president blabbering on and on, a handshake and a wreath of roses. Nobody gets fired. People just try to cover each others asses and save their jobs.

Inflated title as usual

[obeythefist]

It was just damaged, probably someone dropped it and put it back in hoping nobody would notice.

Happens all the time! Although you would hope people would be more willing to own up to that kind of thing for anything life threatening.

I guess they never talk about the guy that dropped the o-rings while they were putting them on the shuttle, huh...

Boy are you an idiot

[Quadraginta]

NASA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has killed dozens of our best and brightest people through carelessness, malfeasance, and incompetence.

No, they've killed one and a half dozen astronauts through making mistakes, and if you use your head for something other than keeping your ears apart you'll realize that making mistakes is part of their mission. That's what exploration and research are all about. How the hell do you expect to learn anything new if you don't make mistakes? Did you learn to walk without skinning your knees? Did you learn to use the toilet without crapping in your pants once or twice? Does any complex program compile the first (or fifth) time through without error?

Or do you think using chemical bombs to accelerate people and tons of hardware to 4 or 5 miles per second up into a hard vacuum, with reusable craft, over and over again, with randomly shifting priorities set by a bunch of accountants and lawyers is a trivial task, the kind of thing any moron can get right the first time?

Apparently you haven't learned that the way to avoid any mistake is totally obvious in hindsight, but that, alas, this profound wisdom has yet to reduce the frequency with which human beings make mistakes. Go accomplish something new and remarkable in your life, count up the goofs you make along the way, and then come back with a little more wisdom and a little less clueless arrogance.

Re:Boy are you an idiot

[Repton]

While I agree with you that you need to accept some mistakes, NASA's bureaucracy has not been faultless. I encourage you to read Richard Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster.

Sample quote:

Engineers at Rocketdyne, the manufacturer, estimate the total probability [of mission failure] as 1/10,000. Engineers at Marshal estimate it as 1/300, while NASA management, to whom these engineers report, claims it is 1/100,000. An independent engineer consulting for NASA thought 1 or 2 per 100 a reasonable estimate.