Responsibility of Astronauts.

Great Debates
1

Maybe this will boil some people’s blood here, because basically what I’d say now after my “realization” is that the death of the Collumbia crew is their own damn faults, at the least, the fault of the commander.

Allow me to explain.

It happend (my realization) when I was arguing with someone about the actual speed of impact of the foam peice on the shuttle wing, and the issue of the Engineers telling NASA adminstrators that there could be a problem came up. Obviously it is the same old story, those on the Ground didn’t pay attention and people lost their lives. Well I told them, “This is the boy who cried wolf syndrome it’s pointless to argue about it. Those engineers offer possible or actual possible problems all the time, they bombard NASA with it, if they listened to the engineers then the Shuttle or any space craft for that matter, would probably never get off the ground.”

NASA’s officials have a hard time of choosing which concerns to pay attention to (spend money on) and which concerns to ignore…sadly with NASA’s budget they can’t pay attention to all concerns.

But then it dawned on me.

Whatever happend to the good ol’ days of Apollo?

I remember how Wally Schira told Dyke and the other adminstrators because the Crash couche’s land tests were not so “hot” that “If the Wind goes above 18 knots we’ll be blown back on shore in case of an Abort and die because these couches can’t handle a land impact. So we won’t launch then.”

This is the exact same senario only in a different situation. NASA saw a small problem, decided it wasn’t a big deal, the Commander of the Mission told them, “No no it is a big deal, we aren’t going if the conditions aren’t right.”

That is when it hit me, for the most part, the Collumbia disaster was the fault of the Commander, not the engineers for not getting the word through, not for the Adminstrators for not listening. But for the Commanders of all the shuttle program for not addressing it.

When NASA first began manned spaceflight they didn’t want to give the Astronauts any control of the craft, the orginal 7 rebelled and that shut up NASA…so from the very beginning the Astronauts have been able to get things moving in the proper direction.

It was the Astronauts who finally decided to have an outward opening hatch (wally schira again actually).

It was the Astronauts who worked closely with the safety personnel and made recomondations to NASA or even threats of when to go or not.

This of course worked both ways. NASA sometimes threatened Astronauts to not do stupid stunts (such as Apollo 17’s crew wanting a 4th EVA). But for the most part, the difference between the Shuttle Program and the Apollo program has been the responsibility level of the Commanders.

In Apollo, the Commanders were not afraid to say “We’re not going if these problems aren’t met.” (Mainly none of them wanted to see another Apollo 1 and so started paying close attention to their space crafts).

Today that is all but lost…the Commanders wait for NASA’s word and are barely involved in the saftey check, this strikes me as odd because it is the Commander who has his hand on the abort switch.

Now maybe this is a deeper problem in that the engineers are no longer going to the Astronauts but to the Adminstrators alone…but this still falls under a problem of the Commanders.

It is the Commander’s responsibility to speak with the engineers about flight concerns.

It is the Commander’s responsibility to give the final go or no go for launch if he feels there is a problem from the data given him. That doesn’t mean he sits there 30 seconds to launch and attempts to order a count-down halt because of some concern he has. This means that it is his responsibility during his training for the mission, to know his ship, to know what problems can await him, and to bring it up in the technical breifings with the NASA admin.

Because we all know that NASA’s administrators are not going to listen to the underdog technicians and engineers, in an ideal world they would but administrators are politicians and it is the way things work.

But when an Astronaut says, “look, there’s a problem that’s been brought to my attention that foam is coming off of the liquid fuel tank and can possibly put a hole in the shuttle’s heat shield. I think this needs to be checked out before we launch.”

History of NASA shows that if the Commander of STS-107 had brought that up in a technical briefing, more likely than not he would have been listened to.

So while we are back to where we always were, NASA admin. being blamed for not listening, getting fired for it, and bouncing the blame all over the place.

After all, when a problem occurs in the US Navy is the bureaucracy back in Washington DC blamed for it? Partially, but not really. The blame is put on the man in charge.

I think, like with the US Navy, we need to place the blame of the fate of the ship on the one man truly responsible for that ship. The captain. In this case, the Commander.

After all, he has his hand on the abort handle, he at any time makes the true decision to go or not. It is he who commands the ship, not the array of support at Cape Kennedy or Houston. It is his responsibility to gather the information he needs to make the proper judgement of go or no go, of what to do in a crisis, and he must make the stand against a Congress pressured bureaucracy if they do not see the problem as he does.

Collumbia, was as much the fault of the Commander of STS-107. The Commander of STS-97…all the Commanders of every Space Shuttle launch, that did not bother to hear the warnings of the Engineers and make the decision to not go until the problem was redressed.

2

Do you have any evidence that the commander of Columbia (note spelling) was aware of the foam problem beforehand? Or that a reasonable commander would have been aware of it? Do you have more evidence that this is a shared failing of all the commanders of every mission?

If not, I think that this post is just a bit of a rant, and one that’s sure to raise the ire of other posters, if not designed to do so. On the plus side, thanks for getting rid of your motto. It freaked me out.

3

This is certainly not a ramble, this is an absolute dead on problem.

NASA’s current policy is to have all concerns sent up the chain of command via email http://www.nasawatch.com/msfc/CAIB.SD40.html …well that’s ok, not effective, but there’s a lot of data being moved up the line and like a Senator, the administrators don’t have time to see it all. They delegate the effort of checking what is valid and not to others.

Well that is not my point. My point is that the Astronauts themselves no longer take the intiative to find out what might be wrong and to see that fixed.

Main reason, the number of test pilot astronauts has declined greatly and the “routine” of going up has increased. The Shuttles have flown 100 times + a few more.

Wally Schira was a damn good test pilot flying the Apollo craft for the first time, so when it came down to it he knew specifically to watch out for “problems” and he found them and rectified them.

Astronauts today don’t do this.

The Commander Astronauts did not expect ever that foam on the liquid fuel tank was a problem, but many engineers did and NASA officials weren’t listening.

It is the responsibility of the Commander to make it policy for the Commander to talk to the engineers about possible problems to see them fixed.

It used to be a very integral part of the craft that the Astronaut was involved with, the visited the people that worked to build his ship, he visited the test engineers, the safety engineers, he worked with the people who inspected his craft.

This goes on less so. More now than ever an Astronaut trains for the mission than he spends time working with those who know what’s going on with his ship.

More so now than before, Astronauts handle the experiments and flying, Engineers handle the building and inspecting.

It used to be that they had a very powerful communication link.

Now they don’t.

The Commander of STS-107 did not receive any warning that foam could be a problem with the Shuttle, no Commander ever received this warning.

The problem was the same with Challenger. The Commander knew there was sever cold the night before. The Engineers were concerned maybe this had caused a problem. The Commander did not ask what the engineers thought, the people on the ground decided that it wasn’t a problem and made it a go and the Commander went.

Wally Schira (great example) or Borman or any Apollo commander…would have said, “Hey hold it, what is the testing for this Space Craft after it has been through a cold snap?” If that answer came back “we don’t know, but it shouldn’t be a problem” … they would have aborted.

That was the difference between the Apollo Era Commanders and today’s Commanders.

And that’s the difference that should be the responsibility of the Astronauts to rectify.

Do you see what I’m saying?

But also to answer your direct question.

The evidence is in the result. Rick Husband (Commander? Can’t remember right off the top of my head), did not know about the foam problem. Many of the commanders didn’t and many even said this immediately after the event. None of them imagined that it was a problem they were all shocked.

But the Engineers expected the problem, now the focus of the media has been on the Administration’s not listening to the Engineers.

The reality is that the Astronauts themselves should have been listening to the Engineers.

That is their first responsibility as a Commanders and sailors of their ship.

And they should be held accountable for that.

They should from now on keep in good touch with their Engineers.

And it’s not hard to do, like I said, just bring it up in the technical briefing…“What are the current concerns with the space shuttle from the engineering department?” blah blah blah. “Ok I don’t think we should go until this that and that there is fixed.”

What is NASA going to do? It could try to find another crew but Astronauts do listen to eachother…if one would give up their flight because of safety none of the others are going to jump to replace him.

Now do you want specific resources of what I’m saying to be right?

Gosh there’s just tons of books you’ll have to read.

“A Man on the Moon” by Andrew Chaikin is good.

“Apollo Expeditions to the Moon” edited by Edgar M. Cortright NASA SP-350 is a good look at Commander//Engineer relationships during the Apollo era.

There’s current information out on the web about Astronaut preperation for Missions and it doesn’t usually involve the Commanders visiting the Engineers at the Cape extensively.

Now also, in conclusion, you point out that “Do you have any evidence that the commander of Columbia (note spelling) was aware of the foam problem beforehand?” Also I’m aware how to spell columbia but type fast and hit l’s twice usually. Mainly because I use words like spelling or usually a lot more.

Anyways, are you under the impression that I’m criticizing the Commander for making a bad decision? It doesn’t matter if he knew or didn’t know…the fact is he didn’t because if an Engineer tells you (hey, foam’s been knocking off heat tiles every launch there could be a problem) no Commander (at least good Commander) would say ok to a launch without safety provisions in place.

In fact I was sitting at a discussion where the very thing came up by an ex-NASA individual who said to someone else in the room, “The should have known better. Ever since they put up the ISS it should have been protocol to dock there and inspect for damage.”

This was before this became official protocol, now it will be standard proceedure to dock with the ISS before re-entry, to inspect and fix any problems and if they are too sever to have another shuttle on stand-by.

If the Engineers and general NASA employees knew they should have known better, why didn’t the Captains of the Ships?

That’s my point.

In the end it is not the responsibility of the other employees, but of the Commanders and Astronauts of the Shuttles to be aware of problems in proceedure. This was how it was before the Shuttle program, why did they let it change?

4

The astronauts were aware of the risks, and if NASA decided to launch a shuttle now, even with all the known problems, they’d have a long line of volunteers to choose from. I would ascribe this to that combination of bravery and thrill-seeking that Tom Wolfe famously named, although since the end of Apollo I think the thrill-seeking is more significant and the bravery, in the sense of taking risks for the glory of America and the advancement of mankind is less so. I don’t think anyone would classify the astronauts as victims in the sense that a passenger in a commercial airplane crash is a victim.

On the subject of the technical assessment of risk: The official line is that risks are quantifiable and that a flight decision is a simple comparison of calculated risk to acceptable risk. Anyone who deals with complex machines knows this is hooey. The machines have so many millions of parts, that can fail in so many known and unknown ways, that you have to take an almost moralistic approach: do what you think is “right”. Whether an engineer is “crying wolf” is almost totally a subjective judgment. The required reliability of any one part is so high that the actual risk cannot be conclusively determined. Suppose the shuttle has a million parts and a required overall reliability of 99%. That means that all the given parts with all their known and unknown failure modes can add up to at most a 1% risk of failure. A typical part might thus have a required reliability of 999,999,999 in a billion. How are you going to measure that? Test ten billion parts and make sure you have less than ten failures? The assessment of risk for complex systems like the shuttle is not yet a science.

Personally, I think the Columbia disaster was a simple case of technical error that was not caught by the self-checking process. I don’t buy into the sociological explanations that you get so much of in these high-level failure investigations. The solution is to hire better people and give them more time and money to do a thorough job. It always has, and always will be the case that tremendous pressures exist to both get the damn thing off the ground and make sure it doesn’t fall apart.

5

I’d agree that there’s probably the fact that there is a long line of volunteers of Astronauts, that inhibits safety.

I was thinking of exactly that in certain respects, if a Commander refuses to go on a mission (such as wally did), and NASA says, “Ok whatever…we’ll find someone else” and they CAN then how is the Commander to force his will as a Commander?

It’s the same problem in the Unions, if the Company can find the labor elsewhere the Union falls apart as an authority.

However, that still shows it is the responsibility of the Astronauts. They are a team. A close team. All 100 currently active members (less than 100-140? not sure on the exact number).

But I get the feeling that the Media paints the Astronauts as “Victims of an Airplane” crash as you’d put it. The Media has been really hard on top NASA officials and not even bothered at once to mention the fact that the first measure of responsibility for the Vehicle rests with the Commander.

And I would agree on your last point, it’s simply a technical error.

But where’s the connection between the Astronauts and the engineers who oversee flight saftey that there used to be in the Apollo era? It seems to me that the Astronauts have been phased out and that means in part they let themselves be.

Perhaps there needs to be the exclusive “Astronaut’s Union”.

Where if a Commander deems a specification on his craft to be too dangerous…his spot will not be passed to the next happy Astronaut…it won’t work because as Government employees you can’t form Unions…but something must be done to ensure again that the responsibilities of the Astronauts are held to practice and not just theoretical implications.

6

Looking at the problem from the other side, I’d say the astronauts are relying on a good, working chain of command–and that, as commanders of their missions, they have to delegate a lot of stuff to a lot of other people. I’m sure they have a hell of a lot to worry about as is, without having to go around and question every single engineer about what they think may go wrong with a flight.

In this case, it seems, the chain of command wasn’t working so well. Should the commanders be blamed? Maybe. But it seems they are more in the position of lead actors in a movie, whereas the NASA admin. are the directors and producers – and if someone dies on set, it’s not the actors’ fault, it’s the director’s/producers’ fault.

7

I agree, it’s not “one” thing over the other.

But as with Apollo 1, you can’t find the source problem and ignore other problems that were on the fringe, this happend with Challenger and so the problem occurred again in a different format, in the form of Columbia.

The problem is the Engineers not being listened to by the NASA admin.

The problem is the Astronauts not taking an ititiative to see that as much safety is involved with their craft as possible.

The former now will be looked at, but the later, again is over looked.

As for poor chain of command…well it is the Commander’s responsibility in my opinion to see to it that the Chain of Command is intact.

It is of course the top officials primary responsibility to do so…but if a Captain of his ship sees that his seamen are not being listened to by their Division Officers because their Company Commanders or such are not bringing the message up to them, then it is the duty of the Captain to rectify that.

That is the NASA Chief Director’s responsibility…but also the Astronaut’s.

It is the Astronaut’s responsibility as much as it is the responsibility of a Captain to know what is going on with his ship, which means if he is not getting information he seeks it out throug his proper channels.

If those channels are no longer existant in NASA as in the Apollo era…then someone should fix that.

8

BC, have you ever worked in a large company on a large project? It doesn’t seem like it to me. First of all, I rather suspect the shuttle astronauts have a lot less clout than the Mercury or Gemini astronauts did. The original 7 were on the cover of Life, they were famous, almost every child in the country knew their names. Who knows the names of any of today’s astronauts, until they get killed, that is. Even with that, Apollo 1 happened. Ever read about that? The wiring of that capsule was a total botch. There were complaints from the astronauts about it, and no one listened.

NASA has big problems, in that concerns need to be better addressed, even if 95% of them turn out to be baseless. But don’t blame the astronauts for it. It is easy in hindsight to say that Challenger shouldn’t have launched in the cold. Do you have a cite for the foam being considered a problem before the launch? Not checking after the launch, when they knew something hit the wing, was a more serious blunder, not that anything could have been done necessarily. But Mission Commanders have more to do than read and understand every engineering memo created anywhere in NASA or in the contractors.

9

Typical of the OP, a maligning of the dead for no just cause.

Was the commander of the shuttle aware that foam was going to strike his ship and destroy it to the point of destruction? No.

Had foam impacted the shuttle before, and not caused the destruction of the ship? Yes.

So was there any reason to fear the destruction of the craft from a piece of errant foam? No.

So, why, again, are you maligning the dead, Broken_Record?

10

Do you also know that the foam loss wasn’t even known for several days, after frame by frame inspection of the launch film? What should the crew have done then - say that they’d just stay up there instead fo attempting re-entry with a damaged vehicle they couldn’t have fixed? Given that Discovery could have been launched on a rescue mission in time if the decision had been made then, perhaps - but that would be a NASA call, not a crew commander’s.

Do you also understand that the shuttle system is immensely more complex than a Mercury capsule, beyond the ability of any one person to understand intimately in every detail? Or that it the crew commander has both the least time and the least ability to deal with system problems directly?

Every mission is a joint effort of thousands of people, all of whom share responsibility. Go-NoGo decisions have to be made by the people in the best position to understand all the ramifications, and generally they’d be the people on the ground. But, once the launch is made, the Flight Director is an absolute monarch - the crew takes his directions.

11

Once again, Broken_Record decides to skip out of dodge when his ignorant, arrogant, longwinded OP is totally shot down by those nasty little things called “facts.”

Same song, fifty-seventh verse.