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Robert Boisjoly Dies At 73, the Engineer Who Tried To Stop the Challenger Launch
demachina writes "Robert Boisjoly has died at the age of 73. Boisjoly, Allan J. McDonald and three others argued through the night of 27 January, 1986 to stop the following day's Challenger launch, but Joseph Kilminster, their boss at Morton Thiokol, overruled them. NASA managers didn't listen to the engineers. Both Boisjoly and McDonald were blackballed for speaking out. NASA's mismanagement 'is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel,' Boisjoly said after the 2003 Columbia disaster. 'I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.'"
They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.
(This is going to be incredibly insensitive torwards those lives that were lost, but it has to be said.) 17 lives lost in the last 50 years of U.S. space exploration really is not too bad considering how many lives where lost during other times of exploration, pioneering eras and the building of industry. I think NASA tries to be perfect and after all they are rocket scientists, but to assume that NASA is the only place that has mismanagement is incredibly naive. Look at the rest of government. Look at the military. Look at the FDA for crying out loud. Am I saying that you should have deaths? No, what I'm saying is that you need to have a little perspective. Only 17 lives lost in 50 years means that you're at least doing something right to safeguard all the other lives that you saved through careful proceedure and cool heads.
It's *Roger* Boisjoly, like TFA says.
Perhaps he should be nominated for the not-yet existing Bradley Manning prize for integrity in the face of overwhelming odds.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Did he use Linux or something?
Please hand in your nerd badge at the exit before you leave.
Because it's also stuff that matters, yet what he said didn't matter a lot to [whoever's fault was], apparently.
It's not the same scale, but I've had similar arguments with my manager about the quality and safety of the products we develop and even thought I'm the one who knows the code and how it works, he's the one that decides that we don't need to fix it and that it's "good to go." How well does it work? Bring up a simple informational screen and the system crashes.
These airheads seem to think that just because they're in a position of authority, they must be right.
In every disaster you will always find somebody that predicted it and that includes clairvoyants. If these guys did not have a strong enough case, there where up against the others that made a better case then them. NASA should and has been held accountable for its wrongs. Do not forget that going to space is hard, real hard and NASA designed and flew the space shuttle which was the most complex machine by a margin and it hardly had any prototypes.
The other options are spend a hell of a lot more money ensuring safer rides or don't go (or possibly fix what is wrong with NASA).
I think NASA a has a good balance considering its successes and now the private sector is being baby stepped into taking some of the roles.
He killed 14 people, so why isn't he in jail?
" NASA managers didn't listen to the engineers."
This is different from any place else? CEO's and executives are convinced they know more than the engineers. And when they don't listen and fail, They BLAME the engineers.
This is Modus Operandi of any corporation and Government agency.
Guess what executives, engineers do know a whole lot more than you do.
I know the solution, any time engineers reccomend against something and management does it anyways and a failure happens. 1st the executive has to take all responsibility for the failure. Financial and moral.
2nd, every engineer gets to kick the executive in the nuts two times.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When an engineer says don't go with the launch. Sorry but just stfu and listen to him. FFS, he's not the idiot citizen who doesn't know squat. He's an engineer and 3 of them argued...wow. And the management still didn't listen. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth. On top of that, I'm not an american and I'm very touched by this story, news and especially those lost lives. All of that could of been avoided and they would still learned from their mistake, corrected the problem and go forward with the launch later. My question is: what happened to the guy who still said let's go with the launch ? Did he get accused of murder ?
Look kid, it's not a case of always doing things right. It was a case of people coming in that were not doing things right and as a consequence getting others killed. The Russians had that problem as well, for instance an idiot in charge of a project forcing people to take stupid shortcuts at gunpoint and getting hundreds killed in an explosion. Yes, bad management happens a lot but that's no excuse not to put projects with severe consequences of failure under adult supervision instead of some horse judge that has powerful friends.
Both Boisjoly and McDonald were blackballed for speaking out.
I think that's the bigger issue here. NASA really hasn't changed, they're the same arrogant, top heavy, risk adverse organization they bloated into during the 80's. You'd think they would have been humbled by seeing heavy lift moved over to the Russians, but it hasn't dented their attitude one bit.
It's not the lives that were lost, it was the circumstances surrounding the loss and the general lack of accountability afterwards. Engineers who try to sound warnings still will get blackballed. Nothing really changes when you have the problem dictating the solution.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"Robert Boisjoly Dies At 73, the Engineer Who Tried To Stop the Challenger Launch"
73 tried to stop the Challenger Launch?
I'd rather trust Lemmy Kilmister instead...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That is not the right perspective. It's like putting a one time murderer "into perspective" by saying he managed not to kill anyone in the previous 50 Yyears of his life and therefore he must be doing something right.
Killings have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. perpetrators need to be punished and lessons need to be learned.
From the 1987 LA Times article:
And for that, there was an additional private cost: resentment on the part of those who had been hoping to avoid, at least in part, official blame. It came from corporate executives, and from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Morton Thiokol's biggest customer. And it came from colleagues fearful that too much exposure of truth might hurt business and cost them their jobs.
"If you wreck this company, I'm gonna put my kids on your doorstep," grumbled one. Someone finally dubbed the engineers "the five lepers."
This is the sad reality: Whistle-blowers are often the target of ostracism from their contemporaries, while usually unanimously admired later in historical context. It's still not easy to be a whistle-blower, if anything, it's harder than ever.
When the bids went out to professional engineers in the aerospace seal business, my friend, now gone sadly, was asked to bid on the large O'Ring seal design for the shuttle booster rockets.
He did his basic expansion calculations on what temperature changes would do to the large diameter structure and came to the conclusion it would not work and replied declining to quote with a note that it didn't seem to be workable because of basic physics.
Rudolph's opinion was never seriously taken and we know the result.
It is worth mentioning that CONTRACTIALY the SRB’s were rated to handle such weather. Who failed there? Why is this not mentioned or reported?
Then there is Lockheed’s nonsense with changing over the foam insulation on the Shuttles external tank to an “Environmentally Friendly” one which exacerbated the issue of blowing holes into the flight vehicle. Somebody knew enough about the potential problem to get a exemption from the EPA to use the old foam, yet the new foam was utilized.
Groups of people tend toward internal modes counter to their purpose. The larger and longer-lived the group, the stronger this effect. It's easy to think we're intelligent and capable beings when you look at individuals, but on larger scales our true nature becomes clear. Unnecessary disasters will always plague large engineering projects, because we're more like monkeys than ants.
I prefer to remember him as the cool guest lecturer and advisor we had at Weber State for the NUSAT program. Keen intellect, razor sharp, and driven. There's more to the man than just Challenger.
It took courage for the engineers to speak up and back their assertions and warnings, but more to the point, there had to be irrefutably compelling evidence for them to do so. That is what I find so disturbing. It is an unfortunate paradox that, in big business (and let's not fool ourselves; NASA is big business), priorities are different for upper management than they are for those doing the actual work... and the brains and ethics do not lie in management, regardless of venue.
Ron McNair was in the physics program at MIT with my brother-in-law, and they were extremely close for numerous reasons. Ron was brilliant, selfless, deeply touched the lives of many young people, was a phenomenal father and husband, and a gift to his community and beyond. His future was exceedingly bright. Ron was like an uncle to my nephew, who was four when he watched uncle Ron that day. For very personal reasons as well as universal ones, I wish management had done something right for a change.
I think you just did.
English is not this
That is all. Also, kinda late to the party with this news.
Here is some perspective. The question is how many of these types of warnings are issued every flight? It's very similar to when environmental groups oppose every development project. If you go out every time warning of disaster eventually a disaster happens and you are proven right. But what is the alternative? To never build? To never fly?
Anyone who has ever designed anything critical always has a feeling they may have missed something. There is a phase called analysis paralysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis) . It is when you never do something because you are always checking another scenario in which it may fail.
Whenever any complex system fails there will always be a record of someone warning about it because that is what engineers do. In fact it is obvious after the fact. We always think of ways something can fail. But with limited time and limited budget we can't follow all of those lines of thought to their conclusion. You have to prioritize the risks and accept them to get things done.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Can you expect to walk to your fridge without incident? generally yes.
Can you expect to drive 50 miles without incident? generally yes but quite often (this mornings commute) no.
Can you expect to achieve orbit, the shuttle must accelerate from zero to a speed of almost 28,968 kilometers per hour (18,000 miles per hour), a speed nine times as fast as the average rifle bullet. without incident ever? no you cannot.
Someone is not insensitive for pointing out the risk involved in such a new and very dangerous procedure
I was working for a large, not directly tech related (though they do some research) Federal Agency last year and the word came down that the "Chief" (the highest ranking civil servant, not appointee) was unwilling to kill more people. We had a work stoppage, training classes etc. And the attitude of "Well, adjusted for man-hours of work we kill fewer people than other agencies." was unacceptable. He claimed he was tired of flying out fro D.C to attend funerals.
So we did training classes and any employee is now supposed to be able to cry "Stop!" when something starts to get too hazardous without consequences. During the classes employees who tried to use the argument "Well, adjusted for man-hours of work we kill fewer people than other agencies." were "hammered" for missing the point. *The point is a culture of safety where one loss is unacceptable.*
I find that sane and sensible.
Will it work? Who knows. It will probably take a few years to find out.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.
(This is going to be incredibly insensitive torwards those lives that were lost, but it has to be said.) 17 lives lost in the last 50 years of U.S. space exploration really is not too bad considering how many lives where lost during other times of exploration, pioneering eras and the building of industry. I think NASA tries to be perfect and after all they are rocket scientists, but to assume that NASA is the only place that has mismanagement is incredibly naive. Look at the rest of government. Look at the military. Look at the FDA for crying out loud. Am I saying that you should have deaths? No, what I'm saying is that you need to have a little perspective. Only 17 lives lost in 50 years means that you're at least doing something right to safeguard all the other lives that you saved through careful proceedure and cool heads.
14 out of how many? What is the percentage of lives lost in space exploration vs other pioneering eras?
They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense.
(This is going to be incredibly insensitive torwards those lives that were lost, but it has to be said.) 17 lives lost in the last 50 years of U.S. space exploration really is not too bad considering how many lives where lost during other times of exploration, pioneering eras and the building of industry. I think NASA tries to be perfect and after all they are rocket scientists, but to assume that NASA is the only place that has mismanagement is incredibly naive. Look at the rest of government. Look at the military. Look at the FDA for crying out loud. Am I saying that you should have deaths? No, what I'm saying is that you need to have a little perspective. Only 17 lives lost in 50 years means that you're at least doing something right to safeguard all the other lives that you saved through careful proceedure and cool heads.
Sometimes, Failure really is not an option. If you want to work at the highest levels, you need the highest standards, and you need managers who keep pushing for the highest standards, no matter ego, emotion, or pride. Your kind of thinking leads to failure.
So how much would it have cost NASA if they had delayed the launch and investigated the concerns? I'm not singling out NASA, I mean-- how much would it have costs to resolve the issues with the DeepWater Horizon prior to its devastation of the Gulf of Mexico? As I see it, the problem is that we don't train managers to have anything but the shortest term vision and understanding of consequences.
I mean, empirically if you presented the case as: You can delay the launch, address the concerns, and make sure its safe (to the best of your ability) OR you can rush the launch, satisfy the politics, and run the risk of killing people and destroying billions of dollars worth of hardware-- most reasonable people would probably conclude under most circumstances that they should investigate the matter and launch when satisfied.
What is it about LEADERSHIP/MANAGEMENT, whether in Congress, Wall Street, or a federal agency like NASA that encourages people to exaggerate trivial priorities (from the long term standpoint) in favor of taking what would otherwise be unreasonable risks? What about our culture needs to change in order to raise the value of long term vs. short term thinking?
When it's an engineering issue that should be pretty obvious, just as if it's a financial issue you get the perspective of the people that know about financial issues.
Or to put things bluntly, when it's an object that exists in reality no amount of purely wishful thinking is going to change it - you need to do real things to do so instead of thinking up some words to use as some sort of silly incantation to pretend everything is OK.
You actually wrote that referring to somebody else's words and not your own? Here's the thing, no amount of blind confidence is going to change some object that exists without actually doing something to it. That's the realm of engineers etc. You can set the parameters but they have to actually do something to take vague dreams and produce real outcomes. When things need to be know you don't ask the guy that says "bridge that river" but instead ask the guy that designed it or the methods used to build it.
Sorry Soulskill, but you need to have someone proof your captions, as they are consistently of poor quality. This one got the subject's name wrong, and appears to imply that the number 73 was an engineer.
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
Because it was Larry Mulloy and Jerald Mason. From http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/shuttle/shuttle1.htm
Marshall's Solid Rocket Booster Project Manager, Larry Mulloy, commented that the data was inconclusive and challenged the engineers' logic. A heated debate went on for several minutes before Mulloy bypassed Lund and asked Joe Kilminster for his opinion. Kilminster was in management, although he had an extensive engineering background. By bypassing the engineers, Mulloy was calling for a middle-management decision, but Kilminster stood by his engineers. Several other managers at Marshall expressed their doubts about the recommendations, and finally Kilminster asked for a meeting off of the net, so Thiokol could review its data. Boisjoly and Thompson tried to convince their senior managers to stay with their original decision not to launch. A senior executive at Thiokol, Jerald Mason, commented that a management decision was required. The managers seemed to believe the O-rings could be eroded up to one third of their diameter and still seat properly, regardless of the temperature. The data presented to them showed no correlation between temperature and the blow-by gasses which eroded the O-rings in previous missions. According to testimony by Kilminster and Boisjoly, Mason finally turned to Bob Lund and said, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." Joe Kilminster wrote out the new recommendation and went back on line with the teleconference. The new recommendation stated that the cold was still a safety concern, but their people had found that the original data was indeed inconclusive and their "engineering assessment" was that launch was recommended, even though the engineers had no part in writing the new recommendation and refused to sign it. Alan McDonald, who was present with NASA management in Florida, was surprised to see the recommendation to launch and appealed to NASA management not to launch. NASA managers decided to approve the boosters for launch despite the fact that the predicted launch temperature was outside of their operational specifications.
Man if fallible. Yes, lives were lost and they were indeed tragic, and I don't want to see more lives lost, but every astronaut or engineer who understand what they do and where they do their work understands that there exists risks, and if an accident occurs, it is result of that risk. The early space program here in the US was wrought with peril because man made the machines man flew in, some flew, some crashed and burned. No one wants to yell "My Bad" when big $$$'s are lost or people are injured or killed, but if they did then man could learn from that mistake.
Science and technology will continue to be tested it to extreme limits, and with that comes the risk. I'm not saying that knowledgeable engineers should be ignored, but rather their voices should be heard so that those taking the ultimate risk directly with their lives or the bureaucrats making those Go, No Go decisions for those taking the risks have enough information to make a judgment call.
Every scientist, engineer, astronaut, etc knows that he or she face risks in the name of their profession.
I take a risk getting into my car every day that it won't explode, or that other drivers on the road will follow the rules or can read the signs.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I read somewhere that the Columbia disaster would have never happened had NASA stuck to the original design of the fuel tank. Originally it was white but the orange foam was added later because NASA quit using CFCs to refrigerate the propellant. The theory concludes that NASA caved to the environmentalist movement resulting in the death of the Columbia crew.
When I was in 4th Grade, I had the good fortune to meet Boisjoly and a couple of other engineers from Thiokol. It wasn't like meeting a national celebrity or anything because I grew up in Brigham City, Utah, which is close enough to Thiokol that you can see the smoke plumes from booster tests rise up over the western mountains.
At my school, a group of fellow students and I had the opportunity to hold a demo model o-ring just like the ones used to join the booster segments. These demo units were just the ones that didn't pass muster for actual use. The group and I held one o-ring spread out in a full circle and nearly covered the entire floor of the classroom. They're huge and didn't feel like the household o-rings I was used to. I could definitely see something like that getting stiff or brittle at low temperatures. My memory is hazy, but I'd almost compare it to a Neoprene type feel.
I mentioned Challenger and how I learned about the o-rings (my grandpa, who also got me started in Electronics, told me about it). The engineers seemed surprised that a ten year old kid would know, let alone care, about that kind of thing.
Among the other visual aids the engineers brought, there was a piece of spongy SRB fuel with a couple of ingredients missing so as to make it inert. It was Boisjoly who calmed me down after I was angry with myself for breaking the piece in half while checking the flexibility of the material to see just how sponge-like it was.
For years after that, while still living in Brigham City, I got to see booster segments passing through town (can't take the freeway) on the way to Thiokol (now ATK) on the back of massive semi trailers with police escorts and utility workers leading the pack with tall poles on the front of their work trucks to make sure the lines over the roads would physically clear the booster and then holding the wires out of the way if there wasn't enough clearance. I always thought back to holding that o-ring and how truly massive it was.
I only ever saw one booster test and that was back in 2003. The dead-silence for the first few seconds (speed of sound, you know?) is eerie. After that, even from over a mile away, the noise hits you like a freight train. Those o-rings are charged with holding back a truly ridiculous amount of force.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly
during this incident. I said it then, and I'll say it now:
Why didn't he go to the press? Hell, he wasn't alone. If all the engineers went to the press, they would have stop the launch.
Hell, and bogus bomb threat would have delayed it until it was warmer.
He tried to go through the system. When the system failed he just returned to his desk.
Yes, it may have cost him his job. Unless MT let their PR handle it.
I was not an engineer, and I was completely outside and unware this was going on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The CFCs weren't used for refrigeration of the tank, they were the puffing agent for the foam. Modern CFC-free foam production process uses steam to puff the foam particles. The steam process foam crumbles far more easily unless you add adhesives of some sort, which make the foam heavier, i.e. something you don't want in a spacecraft.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Easy Solution:
Take one such "manager" and put him on the thing for take off. If they believe it is safe, let them put their money where their mouth is.
Call it a 10,000$ a pound insurance policy.
In the future they may want to make hiring light/small/tiny managers standard procedure. It may have the unintended consequence of allowing for the now larger engineers to physically push management around and intimidate them.
His excellency the minister of Overkill. I don't know if he can be trusted to fly a Space Shuttle though..
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Talking with someone who worked at Thiokol for eight years, when he left he felt ATK seemed to wanting to get rid of the Thiokol name and history like it is ATK that was the SRB leader for all these years. Any Thiokol employees want to chime in on this? post AC?
mfwright@batnet.com
I presented the first award given to Boisjoly and team for their ethics and integrity in the face of bureaucratic opposition. Accepting on their behalf was team leader Arnie Thompson at the first annual meeting of the National Space Society.
Seastead this.
Read "Challenger Revealed" by Richard C. Cook to find out. Page 475 spills the beans. Challenger was not a NASA managed launch - the direction came from Pennsylvania Avenue. Yeah, some poor NASA soul (probably with a mortgage and a kid in college) has his/her hand on the launch button, but the orders apparently came from the head of the executive branch of the US government.
We already knew that before Einstein. He added an exception to the rule, which is the observable speed of light in a vacuum.
And that's why everybody else calls it "The theory of Relativity" but Big Al himself called it "The theory of Invariants". He postulated that other invariants might exist, but the speed of light in a vacuum was the only one he believed he could prove to be real.
I'm an engineer myself. What concerns me is that both Boisjoly and McDonald were blackballed and their careers ruined. Moral to the story: If you can't afford to be the whistleblower, keep your trap shut. Sorry, but in a similar situation, I would only document my objections, and that I had submitted my recommendations and kept my mouth shut afterward. (Now I have to post anonymously).
The concept of tenure starts to make sense here. Appointing a few people, whose livelihoods are independent of their ability to speak their minds without regard to what powerful people think about it, could prevent the types of incidences that occurred with the Challenger and Columbia.
While the cold contributed to the problem - the real problem was joint rotation, the flex of the case when the propellant was ignited and came up to pressure. This caused the joint to open up and leak, even at temperatures well above freezing and well within the operational guidelines.
So, no, he wasn't correct. He wasn't even close.
Disclaimer: I was in a blast bay at Morton Thiokol's small motor division when Challenger exploded, helping US President Ronald Reagan provide cruise missile technology to a bunch of Wahhabist Islamists from the Saudi ruling family who were looking for a vehicle for nuclear warheads from Chechnya.
The Morton Salt boys had bought out Thiokol Chemical Corporation. The Thiokol engineers said "Don't launch" and the NASA bigwigs said "Yo, Morton drones, make those guys shut up!".
So who's at fault? Was it the Morton boys? Their underlings at Thiokol? Was it NASA? Or was it the White House, who told NASA the bird had to fly? Was it Reagan, who had a speech planned for the occasion, and was at least nominally in charge at the White House? Do you really think you can know the answer?
PS: if you've got that one, please let me know about the Kennedy assassination, too - I've never really believed Arlen Spector's "magic bullet" version.
NASA wasn't aware of the link between subzero temperatures and o-ring failures. Boisjoly and Morton Thiokol engineers tried to convince NASA of the issue, but the only evidence they provided was incomplete and showed no correlation. This is the data they provided- http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/WhistleBlowing/challenger.1.gif This is the FULL data that Morton Thiokol did not present in arguing to delay launch- http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/f11/4260/assets/tufte_o_ring_damage.jpg
Before you spout off about the ET insulation foam having been reformulated without CFCs, try reading the CAIB report (volume 1, Page 51), which specifically states that the portion of the foam that broke loose was the OLD CFC-based formulation.
http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/pdf/vol1/full/caib_report_volume1.pdf
The story about the reformulated foam causing the Columbia accident is largely the doing of Rush Limbaugh, who seized on a lie from one of his typically ill-informed listeners, and kept repeating it until it became accepted as fact by everyone on the right.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200508090007
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Dammit, Soulskill, can't you read anymore?
Please fix it.
Don't forget that in the wake of the Challenger Disaster, there was a Commission that was tasked with the investigation. ONLY the last minute theatrics of Dr Feynman with the ice-water and the O-Ring material succeeded in getting his conclusions included in the official report. As an Appendix. His findings were not even going to be reported; findings which supported Robert Boisjoly. So not only did Asshattery lead to the Disaster, it continued in full force undiminished after it. This Asshattery lead to Robert Boisjoly and some of his colleges being "banished", ironically for being right. There is NO EXCUSE for this. None. If this is common everywhere and not just in NASA, even less excuse as then EVERYONE should be on guard. Robert Boisjoly is a hero, we lack people of his caliber. I mourn his loss.
*click**beep**beep* Scotty, One to Mod up!
Boisjoly faxed the imcomplete data over, ya don't say :o
That isn't strictly accurate, NASA had known of problems with the O-rings since at least 1977. And a Shuttle launch had experienced failure of the primary O-rings on two of the joints the previous January 24, 1985. On the evening before the disaster, at a teleconference, Morton Thiokol engineers had recommended the launch be cancelled if the temperature dropped below 53F. This was overruled by NASA and senior people at Morton Thiokol. A good six months before the disaster Boisjoly wrote a memo detailing the problems with the O-rings and cold weather.
AccountKiller
The story about the reformulated foam causing the Columbia accident is largely the doing of Rush Limbaugh, who seized on a lie from one of his typically ill-informed listeners, and kept repeating it until it became accepted as fact by everyone on the right.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200508090007
Credulity when it comes to pithy stories about "tree huggers" getting their comeuppance? Inconceivable! Why be skeptical?!?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
"That's just the thing - they listen to their engineers. Right up until the point where the engineers changed their stories. And that's the part of the tale that Boisjoly et al have spent the last quarter century refusing to acknowledge. by DerekLyons
That's a very interesting take on the subject, but tell me something, do you mind providing verifiable third party citations for:
01. Boisjoly et al changed their stories and spent the last quarter century refusing to acknowledge this.
02. NASA codified the standards for the Shuttle's segmented solids in the late 60's/early 70's - without reference to O-rings.
03. That engineers never told management about problems with the O-rings.
04. Engineers insisted that with some minor modifications to the joint, the problem would go away.
05. Engineers change their story on the evening of January 27th.
06. Engineers never provided a sound engineering rationale claiming the O-rings were unsafe.
07. Engineers repeatedly told management the Shuttle was safe to fly.
AccountKiller
I remember hearing the Boisjoly story in one or two of my upper-level business classes (don't recall which; one was an ethics class and one was something called Systems Analysis And Design)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm sure almost everyone has said this, but his name was Roger not Robert and since it's been a day since this has been posted, perhaps it should be changed. Roger deserves that.
Not to say I told you so cuz I didn't.
but
Back in 85 I passed on an opportunity to transfer to the Shuttle Program at Rockwell. A decision I stressed over for a month. It was why I got into aerospace to begin with. My childhood dream was to be an astronaut, or at least part of that community. The problem was that I'd learned that office politics, national politics, and budget are the driving forces that make decisions, not engineering. At the time, and probably still today, management is filled with people promoted by a variation of the Peter Principle; "people are promoted to their highest level of incompetence". Since you can't fire anyone the only way to get rid of dead wood is to promote them out of your department. As a result critical decisions are made by people without the competence to make them. This was the reason I left my child hood dreams of being an astronaut to join the private sector. I could no longer turn a blind eye to the mindlessness about me. Sure, the engineering challenges and creative people that make up the rank and file were great. But, the office politics were deadly!
Because he's an engineer.
.
My (and my CAATS predecessor's) results were not what the PHBs wanted to hear. They shaved down traffic loads and tried everything they could. Eventually, using loads not at all like what was planned, they got a number they could have a good night's sleep with.
This went on for many many months. I found others in other parts of the project with similar stories -- one was a bug finder who reported bugs that were never fixed in future versions of the program.
One day my PHB was at a meeting with his peers and they asked him a question he couldn't answer. He ran out and got me. I went to the meeting, answered the question and then flatly stated that the network spec'd could not handle the loads. This brought quite a reaction, with one "expert" (on conference call) immediately disagreeing. The only insightful remark made was from the top guy at the meeting who practically whispered "Why wasn't I told about this?"
BTW, part of the network spec was that all design documentation be available for reading and printing. Many of the manuals were not text but scanned images (who knows why, but it gives you some idea how backward big companies can be). One day, at lunch time, I decided I want to print 2 or 3 documents. The next thing you know I get a call from an excited network administrator asking what was I doing, I was saturating the network! A 10Mbps network.
I come here for the love
It's one thing if your dimwitted construction boss makes you use 4x4's when 2x4's will do, but this is the space shuttle, you'd think they could source someone who can do the following:
1. listen to an engineer when they are telling you its gonna blow up
2. realize you dont want it to blow up
3. take the stand necessary to make sure it doesnt blow up
Whenever i try to watch a launch live, they cancel it from like slight wind or a bird within 5 miles, I don't understand why they HAD to launch that day with such a big objection. Note: I saw the challenger live... i won't ever forget that.
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