Duct tape to the rescue in space, again

"Paul Hovnanian P.E." hath wroth:

I only wish that were true. One particular employer (name withheld to protect the guilty) had a chief engineer that apparently believed that it really was necessary to assign the blame before proceeding with the damage control. It was not some malevolent manifestation of evil intentions, but simply the way he operated. Once a problem was discovered, there was a short preliminary investigation. The inevitable question of "why did this happen" would surface, followed by the requisite finger pointing. None of the engineers ever really understood the process, so we simply took turns accepting the blame. Even when it was fairly obvious that we were turning the procedure into a farce, the assignment of the blame continued.

There were also secondary effects. While it was desirable to have everyone fix their own problems, it was somehow not the way things worked. During the finger pointing stage of the process, everyone was on the defensive. Blaming the actual culprit was impossible because they would be so irate at having been blamed, they would tend to do more damage than do damage control. So, the damage control was always assigned to someone totally uninvolved in the project, with predictable results. We solved this problem by deciding who was going to fix the problem in advance, and then made sure that during the finger pointing stage, that person was never assigned the blame, even if they were guilty as charged.

Despite the apparently dysfunctional appearance of this procedure, it does work (somehow). The company has been around for about 37 years and is doing fairly well these days as a division of a larger conglomerate. However, they've gone through several major changes in management and ownership, which hopefully have inspired them to change their ways.

I've never worked for or with any of these, but I suspect that's only true for external affairs. The entire purpose of the organization is to assign the blame (and make recommendations to prevent a repetition). Of course it would be bad policy to prematurely announce a culprit before the final report. However, my guess is that internally, procedures are not quite so correct and proper. I watched this happen during the Y2K transition. Many companies had official policy of not revealing any problems precipitated by the Y2K change. From the outside, it was business as usual with only minor problems. To those inside some of the companies, it was a running fire drill for a few days.

Nice. Business politics is so much fun. I've never seen that happen. What I've seen is premature guesswork that often sounds plausible. Usually, there's an agenda involved. For example, when honey bee colonies were found to be dying off, some nut case immediately blamed cell towers as the culprit. When TWA 800 fell out of the sky, Pierre Salinger got front page coverage by blaming a US Navy missile. The GUM (great unwashed masses) want answers, and quickly, even if the answers are wrong. Corporate America isn't much better.

I have a few skeletons in my closet, where I've made some major mistakes. Fortunately, no lives were lost or anyone injured, but the financial damage was substantial. At the least, I believe in "Learn by Destroying" which implies that if one hasn't made any mistakes, one also hasn't learned very much. Mistakes are a great but expensive way to learn.

Agreed, mostly. I suspect human surrogates (i.e. robots) might be useful. Whether an inspection robot would have caught the condensation problem is doubtful. It has to know what to consider normal in advance. If water isn't on the list, it will probably ignore it.

If humans were not living in the station, there'd be no reason for condensation (or even an atmosphere). So the presence of humans in space helped to cause the problem. We actually know a great deal about building human-free space devices, and when we screw up one of them, nobody dies, unless they happen to be standing under a large chunk that re-enters - and so far as I know, that has not happened, yet.

No, it's anti-bad-engineering, and anti-blaming other people instead of finding the real problem.

John

I just noticed something funny, John. Everyone with whom you get into an extended debate is already on my kill-file list ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Le Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:13:38 -0700, Jim Thompson a écrit:

He, he...

but then the drivers are easier to change :-) (unless this has been engraved in silicon in which case... shit! )

Yep... shit !-)

Fortunately it was back in the golden age of integrated circuits... turn a new revision (rework the mask sets AND do the silicon diffusions) over a weekend ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Boy, you guys really hate peace and international cooperation, don't you?

War is bad, and people who love war are bad people.

Hey - here's a good use for the Space program - just send all of the warlovers to Mars, where they can kill each other to their heartlessness' content, and the rest of us can get on with our lives.

Thanks, Rich

I wonder how many people lost their lives opening up the US frontier.

Was that worth it?

You can't anticipate every mode of failure. That's why you need people there, and tools and supplies, (and duct tape!) so they can troubleshoot and repair stuff on the spot.

Cheers! Rich

I've never understood the hysteria over the Y2K "problem". Hell, the banks solved it before 1970 - thirty-year mortgages, and all that.

And haven't computer clocks always had a 4-digit year, based at

Cheers! Rich

Sometimes the organizational culture just evolves to accommodate the faulty bits. And these adjustments can persist long after the problem has been removed.

I was talking to a local utility about a consulting contract to help them with configuration control problems. Their engineering staff was having trouble getting as-built drawings out and figuring which revision of a drawing a facility was built to. After speaking to engineering management, I managed to meet a few people on the construction side of the house. They filed me in on the history of the problem. Years ago, management had a major jerk that threw blame around and caused some major animosity to develop between engineering and the crews. As a result, they no longer waited for engineering drawings to perform work, but just started to cobble substations together. This left the engineering department with no idea as to what exactly had been built.

The troublemaker had been gone (retired) for about a decade, but the work-around process (and animosity) was still in place. According to one foreman, what the company needed was not an engineering consultant, but a proctologist, since the problem was related to an *sshole. Needless to say, I didn't take the job.

Jimpson

Well, Bush is outta here in 2009 - I just worry what kind of legacy he's going to leave us with, and if we're going to get somebody even worse, like Hanoi Hillary.

Thanks, Rich

Yes - the only ones who are allowed to use it are the ones who were born stupid.

Cheers! Rich

That's not surprising, since you killfile everyone who's not a Bushist nazi wannabe.

Cheers! Rich

Oh, good - then I'm in!

Well, if you want to miss out on a lot of classic, world-class stupidity...

John

But you drag it out too long. I prefer the quick kill myself ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Well you should sort out your election process.......(

It's an eFFing mess. Why don't Monsanto and Exxxron just say/tell the people who they want/have decided upon, in a newscast......

Martin

You read too many scandal sheets.

...Jim Thompson

You miss the point (deliberately or not, I can't tell). Sending robots is faster and cheaper, and gets more exploration DONE. Wetware adds a huge burden in many dimensions - which increases the cost in dollars and lives, as well as slowing things down hugely. The marginal benefits of having a human on-site are exactly that - marginal. The cost of everything but sending humans is marginal compared to the cost of sending humans.