>Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.
I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them.
E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.
Foam strikes happen all the time and we've never lost a craft, please stop making hyperbolic worst-case assessments about a non-issue, it won't help your career path (or mine).
Can you explain? My comment was in the context of Columbia.
“An investigation board determined that a large piece of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank and breached the spacecraft wing.”[1]
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt with your definition of “we”. But your tone seems to point directly to the types of biases I referred to. It’s worthwhile to research the history of the industry as an whole.[2] Prior to the disaster, do you know NASAs response? “Foam shedding happens all the time…it’s ‘in family’ and not a problem.” It was still out of spec for a good reason. The term from the investigation report is “normalization of deviance”.
It seems even as technology progresses, we’ll still be anchored by faults in human psychology.
I think it was an attempt to illustrate the biases that play in and cause safety regulation to be written in blood. Either an attempt at a quote from within NASA, or actually one (I am insufficiently familiar with the entire background of the broken tile to say).
I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them.
E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.