Columbia

[blufive]

As you may have noticed, the official report is out. A brief extract from the introduction:

The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the Space Shuttle Program's history and culture, including the original compromises that were required to gain approval for the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, [and] mischaracterization of the Shuttle as operational rather than developmental [...]

Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop, including: reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand why systems were not performing in accordance with requirements); organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated management across program elements;

For anyone who remembers the details of the Challenger report, this will sound depressingly familiar.

Who cares if we keep finding unexpected holes in the [heat shield/O-rings]? Everything worked fine the last time we flew, didn't it? Not a problem then...

[Additional Note: I hate PDF. With a Passion. It probably would have been quicker for me to hand-copy the above text than try to use the %$^&%-ing text-select tool which decided to do a random word-shuffle on the text when I did a cut-and-paste. Grrr.]

Comments

[makyo.livejournal.com]

For anyone who remembers the details of the Challenger report, this will sound depressingly familiar.

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of the originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In such situations, safety criteria are altered subtly -- and with often apparently logical arguments -- so that flights can still be certified in time. The shuttle therefore flies in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure on the order of a percent. (It is difficult to be more accurate.)
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA's perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believe it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between the managers and their working engineers.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

-- Richard Feynman, Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle

It seems little has changed in fifteen years.

nicholas