Challenger

That's a very jaundiced and negative view. Firstly, they weren't in space when they died; they were at 46000 feet, which was below the operational height of Concorde.

On that subject, the only fatal crash of Concorde took place just after take-off almost 25 years after it started service. By your criterion, supersonic flight would have been blamed for the crash, and its purpose deemed unnecessary, even though the accident had nothing to do with supersonic flight, or perhaps even flight itself. Those Wright Brothers have a lot to answer for!

It is human nature to explore, even at the extremes. Where would America be if it wasn't for the Vikings, Columbus, and others like them?

Hey - don't forget the Africans.

None that John Larkin can understand.

His mud-skipper ancestor couldn't see the point of exploring the area beyond his local mud-flats either.

Of course most folks here don’t really think that we have any purpose here either.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dead is dead. Optimistically, they died instantly but probably not.

What is there to "explore", sealed in a metal can with a few portholes?

Robots are better "explorers" of "outer space" than people. Nobody much cares when they die.

Read the book.

Whatever our purpose, killing astronauts probably doesn't help.

Spending hundreds of billions on spam-in-a-can is a waste of resources that could truly help.

The book is fascinating. The fatheads that decided to launch cared about power, money, and politics. The investigations after the disaster, the same. A few very brave engineers runined their careers to literally shout the truth. And Richard Feynman, who knew he was dying of cancer.

What did the venerable Feynman have to do with this?

Sounds like an expanded rehash of the presidential commission report. For the other side of the story, I highly recommend Diane Vaughan’s “The Challenger Launch Decision”.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It's in the book.

O-rings and ice water.

I would guess it must have been very much like being exposed to a nuclear blast. So basically frazzled to death over several seconds. Not nice.

The crew may have been alive when the cabin hit the water. The recovery of the remains and the forensics was grim. I'm shocked that NASA ever flew another shuttle.

The tiles and the SRBs and the external tanks and the engines were all known hazards. Columbia was the nail in the coffin.

Two shuttles out of five were lost. NASA estimated that the loss rate would be 1 in 100,000 flights.

So about as reliable a statistic as their figures for historical CO2 in the atmosphere, then.

Hmm. I recall estimates of one in four from the days of Feynman and the investigation into the Challenger loss. Maybe that was the post crash estimate, but I don't think even NASA would think that one in

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Joe Gwinn

I think it's less about any particular individual's greed or will to power but more about the dangers of formal "processes" in large organizations which have become so large and ossified that the processes become circular and self-referential.

In some particularly idiotic cases the processes don't have to become particularly large or self-referential to cause disaster, the classic "Well the designer signed off on the modifications to the plans so that means they reviewed them and they're safe for the contractor to implement.." "Wait, the designer signed off on them because they thought the contractor had reviewed them...didn't they?" has definitely cost lives before, and probably will again

Nah, it was much more careful and conscientious than that, and so even more tragic.

Vaughan was expecting to find misconduct and evil capitalism, but her research showed the opposite. She’s an honest and intelligent woman, so she presented what she found in a compelling way, despite it being sociology. ;)

Folks like that don’t grow on trees, which is why I recommend the book so highly.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

This is even crazier.

Of course, NASA always blows budgets big-time.

" In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them."

I guess I'm not grasping from the summary of the Vaughan book how its conclusions greatly differ from the conclusions of Feynman et al.

Surely "normalization of deviance" counts as "misconduct" of some fashion.

As for "evil capitalism" that seems like a strange thing to look for in the Shuttle program given that IIRC it's one of those projects that's pointed to as a quintessential example of a government make-work project.

It surely made some paydays for some contractors but they were mostly companies like Thiokol, Rockwell and NAA who were heavily into the military-industrial pie to begin with. The design was compromised from the start due to DOD requirements for a thousand miles of crossrange for once-around polar missions to scare the Soviets, which it likely did, but it made a lousy space freighter or pure science vessel.

Under Lord Musk's guidance spaceflight has likely never been more profitable, or more generally uninteresting to the public-at-large.

Maybe if you read the book, you’ll understand. The conclusions could hardly be more different, given the basic facts of the case. Boisjoly et al. and the Rogers commission are only a fraction of the story.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I was able to at least find a summary, 620 pages about a disaster I'm barely old enough to remember is a tall ask at this time.

I think I somewhat understand the thrust of the argument, that nobody in management really believed themselves to be taking risks of the kind the public later perceived them to have been taking.

There was no particular person who was actively like "Welp there's probably a decent chance the crew won't make it but we're going anyway because if we don't <some easily enumerable bad thing will happen>", the consequences to everyone involved were far too high to ever be actively cavalier.

They had their processes and they followed the processes. Yeah Thiokol engineers balked when asked about this particular launch but I expect they balked relatively regularly it's no skin off their ass to say "no go", but at the end of the day as a NASA-person your job is to fire rockets with people on them from time to time, either have a manned space program or don't. Can always find reasons not to launch.

It seems there were chain-of-communications problem that may have prevented engineers at Thiokol from emphasizing that this situation was significantly different than others they may have had reservations about before, but it's unclear to me if there was any one person at NASA at the time who had the authority to say "shut it all down, now!", even if those engineers had been able to do so effectively.