Greed and hubris is good. This story reminds me a lot of the recent documentary, Challenger: Final Flight produced by JJ Abrams on Netflix.
“There’s pressures of budget, there’s pressures of schedule,” he said. “And then there’s all these people, these men and women down the chain, who get stuck and saddled with the results of those decisions.”
I can’t help but see a pattern here.
- Big Tobacco
- US opioid crisis
- Challenger disaster
- Grenfell
- Nazi Germany
To paraphrase Baldwin:
“Tragedy is not caused by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
I'll point out the space shuttle disasters as being particularly misunderstood.
The real mistake happened around 1976 when they settled on the basic design which they estimated had a 2-3% chance of blowing up on any launch.
Every other manned space vehicle has had an emergency escape for the crew. An emergency escape system could have saved the lives of the Challenger crew because they survived the external tank explosion (were killed when the crew compartment hit the ocean) -- they thought about putting one in, but then they wouldn't have had space in the hatchback for a satellite.
The thermal tiles were also "unsafe at any speed", it was known at the beginning that the tiles would get broken or fall off sometime and there was a lot of nail-biting around the first flights, but after "it" didn't happen a few times people started to relax.
Sociologist Dianne Vaughn popularized the term "Normalization of Deviance" in connection with the Challenger Disaster but it has been greatly misunderstood with the public.
Today people think it is the doctor not washing his hands and not being confronted by the nurse about it, but in the case of NASA it is a formal process where they make a list of 200 unacceptable situations about the space shuttle that they make the case they can squeak by one by one and each speaker has a few minutes to make a case and if they had bad slides and didn't make a good point they would clear the floor for the next "catastrophe".
"Normalization of Deviance" is a regular procedure with dangerous technology -- it's the paperwork that they fill out because they put the door frame in the wrong way in the break room at the nuclear powerplant or when they fly a regional jet back from a regional airport with one angle-of-attack sensor down because it can be fixed much more easily at the big airport.
I agree. The Challenger Disaster was bad, but the Columbia Disaster was worse. They already know before flying that the designs has many problems, they know before reentry that the thermal protection was potentially broken.
> NASA management referred to this phenomenon as "foam shedding". As with the O-ring erosion problems that ultimately doomed the Space Shuttle Challenger, NASA management became accustomed to these phenomena when no serious consequences resulted from these earlier episodes.
The real mistake happened around 1976 when they settled on the basic design which they estimated had a 2-3% chance of blowing up on any launch.
From what I remember from this case study in university wasn't that the launch risks weren't ignored, they were evaluated and deemed acceptable. The problem was that the effect of outside (weather) temperature on the efficacy of the rubber seals in the fuel conduits wasn't factored into the risk assessments.
After-the-fact analysis of the data from previous launches showed a clear relationship between the outside temperature during launch and the amount of fuel (or oxygen, don't remember) leaked from the joints. But this relationship wasn't known before launch, because (IIRC) nobody had done such a temperature-gradient analysis on the launch data before.
> fuel (or oxygen, don't remember) leaked from the joints.
The o-rings were in joints connecting sections of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The gas blowing past them was the superheated exhaust from the burning solid propellant. This plume of exhaust gas impinged on a strut attaching the SRB to the big orange external fuel tank (ET) (which held liquid hydrogen and oxygen for the space shuttle main engines located on the orbiter.) This soon lead to the damaged SRB detaching from the ET and colliding with it. The ET then catastrophically failed, creating a huge fireball. Some of the crew were likely still alive until their compartment hit the ocean.
Sociologist is probably the word you wanted here, sociology is a science about how societies work, how people work together, stuff like that.
It's certainly possible Dianne is also a socialist although because she's an American it's also likely she does not like that word even if it would be an appropriate label, as Dianne's sociology and educational background might give her good reason to believe that socialist policies are a good idea. But even if so it's not why she's important in this context.
“There’s pressures of budget, there’s pressures of schedule,” he said. “And then there’s all these people, these men and women down the chain, who get stuck and saddled with the results of those decisions.”
I can’t help but see a pattern here.
- Big Tobacco
- US opioid crisis
- Challenger disaster
- Grenfell
- Nazi Germany
To paraphrase Baldwin:
“Tragedy is not caused by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”