I'm watching a show of engg failures, the analysis of the failures. Interesting, btw.

One show covered the shuttle Challenger explosion. It seems, despite engg warnings and recommendations not to launch on that tragic day, mgmt of NASA and the engg rocket company overrode those engg inputs and decided to proceed with the launch. The rationale seemed to be that prior failures, since they were increasingly severe but never catastrophic, justified the risk. There was a quote, describing the situation, something to the effect of 'when playing russian roulette, don't take comfort in the first trigger pull not shooting a bullet.'

What happened to these managers at NASA and the rocket company? I hope they were held criminally negligent resulting in the homicides of several people. And personally civilly liable as well.

If, as business mgmt, you want to make risky decisions w/ financials, that's one thing. But when the risk involves the lives of others, it's disgusting to yield any risk w/o at least involving the participants. Informed risk.

Upsetting.

Risk management is not a science.

It's been a long time since I watched a documentary about the Challenger. It's of interest to me because I was in Orlando at 6yrs old & watched the launch on TV as well as out the window. Saw the smoke. If I recall correctly, and I probably don't, many of the 'managers' were engineers themselves. The show made them look bad, and maybe they really screwed up. I have a hard time believing anyone that works to get a damn rocket into space would knowingly make a call that they thought it would cause it to blow up.

Engineer:
Someone Who Does Precision Guesswork Based on Unreliable Data Provided by Those of Questionable Knowledge.

It's a trite saying, but I have a lot of experience doing just that. I recently moved into a job in a similar capacity to what I did for 18 years but with different products and a larger team under me. There was an issue, I took 3 or 4 people's information/opinion & made a bad call. It didn't make the situation worse, only delayed figuring out the real problem. There were mistakes made by people that I still trust to give me good info. I took the information I had into account & made a judgement call. That's a far cry from criminally negligent or homicide, even if it had been a more severe outcome.

Here's the kicker & what got some Management fired up - if I were put in the same situation, with the same information, I would likely make the same decision. The handful of people involved probably won't make the same mistakes - I know I won't, but we will probably make other mistakes. When I said that, there were some nods & some horrified looks. Guess who I want making decisions?

I worked for one of the major subcontractors on Shuttle at that time. NASA was incredibly political, and everyone was terrified of being the cause of a delayed launch. The news industry was brutal in their reporting, and, of course, rarely accurate.

We were blamed (flight computers) for causing one aborted launch in the final few seconds of countdown. In reality the system detected a bad engine, fuel pump, or engine gimbal iirc. So the computer terminated the launch sequence, but we made the news. There was tremendous pressure on us to never be blamed again.

The solid rocket booster maker was certainly feeling the same pressures. I expect the managers up the chain were all fearful of saying No-Go.

After the Challenger accident the whole program went into upgrade. NASA flipped to a deeply micro-manage attitude, which was terrible. While their engineers were good, they were not expert in my field, nor any other highly technical specialty. I had years of specific experience to become that expert. And of course I was not expert in their specialty.

Congress also used the opportunity to impose requirements that greatly increased cost, objectively reduced reliability, but created some additional US jobs.

I had low confidence in the upgraded Shuttle and in how NASA was managing it.

In my sophomore year of mechanical engineering my term paper was on the Challenger. I read the NASA report cover to cover several times and had a slide deck of about 70 for the class presentation.

I learned about the high torque placed on the field joint when the SRBs fired off a few seconds before the launch, how the very low temp embrittled the normally more pliable O-ring on the field joint and this that caused erosion of the ring even before it left the pad.

I remember watching the hearing on tv and saw Armstrong and a Feynman demonstrate exactly what happened.

As a foreign student asking them for info they were extremely gracious in providing the information and I was directed to communicate with a specific person at NASA HQ.

I learned a lot when doing it - particularly how Roger Boisjoly was almost railroaded as the MT engineer.

There is an interesting documentary about "Group Think" that focuses on the challenger and deals with the decision making processes that led to the flight approval.

From what I remember of it, Fly-Sig knows what he is talking about.

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Originally posted by SpinZone:
There is an interesting documentary about "Group Think" that focuses on the challenger and deals with the decision making processes that led to the flight approval.

From what I remember of it, Fly-Sig knows what he is talking about.

Group think is what I remember from the aftermath of Challenger. Only one person wanted to delay the launch and was overruled by the group.

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engg failures

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With a system that complex, there are always areas of risk. Some risks are higher than others.
The astronauts almost always have an engineering background and likely had some idea of those risks. The O rings were a known issue but the weather was much colder than normal that morning.
An additional motive for sending it up that day was that Reagan was going to be mentioning that launch in his State of the Union speech later that night. He postponed that to give a different one.
If you want to see risky, just look at what the Russians do.

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Originally posted by egregore:

quote:

engg failures

?

Lesser used abbreviation for engineering, I thought most people just used eng...

^^^ One might have said so in the first place.