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Russia Thinks Someone With a Drill Caused the Recent ISS Air Leak (arstechnica.com)
Last week, NASA discovered a small pressure leak on the International Space Station. U.S. and Russian crew members managed to trace the leak to a 2mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle and patch it with epoxy. The drama might have ended there, as it was initially presumed that the breach had been caused by a tiny bit of orbital debris, but Russian news outlets are reporting that the problem was a manufacturing defect. "It remains unclear whether the hole was an accidental error or intentional," reports Ars Technica. "There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test."
"We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull," Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. "We want to find out the full name of who is at fault -- and we will." From the report: NASA spokesman Dan Huot, based in Houston where the space station program is managed, deferred all comment on the issue to Roscosmos. The spacecraft was manufactured by Energia, a Russian corporation. A former employee of the company who is now a professor at Moscow State University told another Russian publication that these kinds of incidents have occurred before at Energia. "I have conducted investigations of all kinds of spacecraft, and after landing, we discovered a hole drilled completely through the hull of a re-entry module," the former Energia employee, Viktor Minenko, said in Gazeta.RU. "But the technician didn't report the defect to anyone but sealed up the hole with epoxy. We found the person, and after a commotion he was terminated," said Minenko. In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.
"We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull," Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. "We want to find out the full name of who is at fault -- and we will." From the report: NASA spokesman Dan Huot, based in Houston where the space station program is managed, deferred all comment on the issue to Roscosmos. The spacecraft was manufactured by Energia, a Russian corporation. A former employee of the company who is now a professor at Moscow State University told another Russian publication that these kinds of incidents have occurred before at Energia. "I have conducted investigations of all kinds of spacecraft, and after landing, we discovered a hole drilled completely through the hull of a re-entry module," the former Energia employee, Viktor Minenko, said in Gazeta.RU. "But the technician didn't report the defect to anyone but sealed up the hole with epoxy. We found the person, and after a commotion he was terminated," said Minenko. In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.
The reason there are issues because people fear losing their jobs if they report a mistake of their own doing. It happens at some companies that don't realize that a mistake is part of normal business operations and thusly an expected cost.
They should find the person that did this and interview him and then hold his management responsible.
"Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novost "We want to find out the full name of who is at fault -- and we will."
Facepalm! Dmitry Rogozin is at fault, you nitwit.
The problem is that the workers were afraid to admit a mistake and get it fixed - to the point that they'd rather jeopardize the mission by hiding the mistake than acknowledge an error. So this jackass responds with "we will find out the full name of the person [and then ...]". That attitude IS the problem, dummy. To fix the problem, your statement would need to be "we want to find out why workers are afraid to acknowledge errors and fix the organizational culture so that errors can be acknowledged and fixed properly, rather than hidden."
Maybe, but he was fired for not reporting a mistake, one that could put lives at risk. If he had reported it, maybe he wouldnt have been fired. Though my guess is fear of getting fired is why he didnt.
Which one do you think is better:
1. Ensure zero mistakes are made, by punishing people who make mistakes, and by other means, or
2. Create a culture where mistakes that are made are correctly reported and dealt with?
Hint: The first one is not possible, because perfection is impossible.
The mistakes should of course be minimized, and intentional incorrect actions, like sabotage, should of course be punished. Of course, you can argue that not reporting a mistake is an intentional incorrect action, but this could be avoided by choosing wisely how mistakes are dealt with. So paradoxally, trying to push for zero mistakes by punishment, you're actually 1) not necessarily reducing mistakes, and 2) additionally causing intentional incorrect actions, thus making the situation worse. If you're a manager, I hope you take some time to consider this.
People make mistakes all the time. The only person who makes no mistakes is a person who does nothing.
So if you punish mistakes, the solution people will come up with is to do nothing. Which will make finishing a project also completely impossible.
Ahahahah... You know Ivan, your propaganda shitposting would be far more effective if your Finnish didn't sound like it came from a 40s black and white movie (no-one in modern Finnish uses the words 'sinjoore' or 'madame' for example) and riddled with typos (you're missing almost every single ä and ö there, and ryssä is written with a y and not a ü which is not even used in the entire language at all you dimwit).
But ladies and gentlemen of Slashdot: if you had any doubts prior to this point that the Russian trollboys are patrolling this site actively, I give you exhibit A: a dude writing about the Clintons in archaic and misspelled Finnish that clearly does not come through Google translate to try and pass as a native..I mean, A for effort, F for execution man.
These guys reply to me as ACs almost every single time I mention Putin in any way here, it's almost kinda endearing, like having a sort of pet. You know Ivan, I don't blame you. Work is hard to find in the current shit economy of Russia, and at least you get an indoors work-environment, hopefully decent pay and bonus points for being an obedient little trooper in the Motherlands fight against 'The West. If you ever end up in here, we can go and have a cup of coffee or tea, and don't worry, I'll bring my own Geiger counter. ;)
Until we meet again, comrade!
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The Soviet Union hasn't existed for nearly 30 years now, dude.
It's back. With communism replaced by fascism, but these two are so similar it's window dressing.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This is simply evidence of the incompetence of the Russian state itself. Roskosmos was re-nationalized in 2016, after experiencing quality control problems so severe they led to launch failures. This extends beyond Rogozin as director since he was deputy under Popovkin who also had problems with launches. The problem is the structure of Russian culture, far beyond this incident being caused by just issue of management philosophy. Putin's culture is one of death, murder, and widespread terrorism directly conducted by Putin himself against the idea of human rights, and against Russia as enemy #1 with the rest of the world as enemy #2. Certainly the claims of sabotage will lead to Russia blaming every other country involved with the ISS.
This is still the truth, no matter how many Russian paid trolls with mod points try to hide it from general viewing.
Their best engineers understand they have the worst manufacturing in the world. That's why everything they make is big, ugly, but it always works.
Yep, the U.S. is responsible for Russia's problems. Putin is an enlightened civil servant and Russia would be a paradise were it not for the naughty U.S. casting a baleful eye in its direction.
In other news, down is up, Trump is smart, the law of gravity is merely a suggestion.
In general this is quite true.
In jobs where perfections is demanded, problem occur, because people are afraid to report mistakes. Often these mistakes could had happened to anyone, but that one guy was the one who did it that day. However they will get fired for making that mistake without learning from it and will need to fire the next guy.
So being the problem isn't fixed, and you could get fired with one off action that lasted less then a second. If you messed up, you are not going to report the problem. you will probably just patch it up, and continue on.
I do a lot of Database work. Sometimes I mess up on my delete command. Now experience has taught me to have a plan for when I mess up. But I still mess up. And others that work with have done the same thing. Now I have some Jr developers on my team, they go into panic the first time that happens. Other then yelling at them, or giving them a hard time, I will work with them to recover as much data as possible and work on getting the data in place. After the experience they are less likely to make the same mistake, and they are better now knowing how to retrieve from backup and make preemptive backups beforehand.
Now if they keep on messing up and deleting the data after going via the process over again. Then I will get tough on them. Making a mistake is fine, making the same mistake over and over again isn't, especially if there are things you can do to stop it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or he may had reported it, and his manager told him to patch it up. But being no paperwork when the problem happened, the fingers got pointed down until there was no one left to point too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
> Now if they keep on messing up and deleting the data after going via the process over again. Then I will get tough on them. Making a mistake is fine, making the same mistake over and over again isn't
This is the correct way to do things. One of the things I do with a junior who makes a mistake is have them fix it with a bit of guidance, but with them doing the actual work. I find that approach helps people become more careful - they're less likely to carelessly screw something up if they've already gone through all the work it takes to fix it. One particular example springs to mind of a linux server in a QA environment - pre VM days - and a junior mistakenly chmodded everything recursively from / . We could have rebuilt the server and restored backups, but I thought it would be a better lesson to have them fix all the permissions by hand. It took said junior most of the day, but after that they became obsessive about triple and quadruple checking anything they were doing with elevated privileges and they never made that mistake ever again, or any other comparable mistake.