No, I was talking about “test flight”. But Tuckerfan has a point that “goof” does not really convey the gravity of the situation. In particular, “goof” tends to connote an unintentional mistake rather than bad judgment (which NASA has raised to an art form).
On the other hand, at least Griffin is being more or less honest with himself and others about the fact that there is a problem. Dan Goldin would have probably said that the media are blowing it out of proportion so would you please give him a break because he doesn’t have time to deal with crackpot Chicken Littles who don’t know how rockets work anyhow, and things are faster, cheaper and better, so please cut my budget. (Goldin is the guy who was in charge of NASA during the time they were busily laying the groundwork for the Columbia accident.) And Sean O’Keefe, master accountant, was out there talking about how the foam couldn’t have caused the Columbia accident because it was just like a lid blowing off a cooler sitting in the back of his pickup going down the highway. Griffin is still OK in my book.
Astronauts are pretty hardcore people. they want to fly so much, I think they would accept almost any risk, just to keep flying. However, those of us on the ground in NASA and DCMA (I are one of them) have the job of keeping those risks as low as possible. Considering the number of flights, the success rate is phenomenal. However, we are still on the hook to minimize the risks. As a personal perception from the bottom looking up, purely speculative and anecdotal, there is still too much emphasis on “making schedule” at the expense of QA (quality assurance) and S&MA (safety and mission assurance).
Right. I thought you surely did. But I took your phrase “big wigs” to be referring to the people ultimately in charge: Griffin and his staff. They’re the ones who decide whether there will or should be more shuttle missions, which is what the OP is on about.
Of course the top people here in Washington are informed by experts all over NASA, including engineers at Johnson I’m sure. It’s a very collaborative decision.
I dare say you wouldn’t. If any airline lost 1 plane in 50, it wouldn’t be able to pay people to get on board.
Still, I’m all for cutting NASA some slack. Yes, they used to just roll the dice. Now it seems that safety concerns are given proper attention. They probably fixed 98% of the foam issues, fixing the rest does not seem to be technically impossible. For all we know, those gap fillers could have been an issue on other flights, we just never took that close a look. The shuttle isn’t broke, but we can’t deny the fleet is aging and we need to get the next generation of spacecraft up to speed.
Well, ok, but then it was a little weird for you to say “Engineers use language like they use numbers - words have specific, fixed definitions,” when you really just meant for that to apply to one phrase, and were specifically excluding the only other piece of language at issue in this thread.
Perhaps, but it takes a huge amount of time and effort to ensure that one’s utterances “tend to connote” only precisely what one wants. This is evident in the large fees demanded by marketing and PR firms. That’s time and effort I’d rather NASA spent elsewhere.
I agree with your assessment, including your appraisal of the other administrators, which I snipped. To me, this indicates that his use of the word “goof” does not allow us to conclude that he needs some sense beat into him with a clue by four, such as the OP offers.
This is an incorrect application of probability; it’s like saying that if you flip a quarter five times and it comes up heads 4 of those tosses, that your odds of getting tails on the sixth toss is 20%. Nope; the odds are always 50%. NASA has never really developed even a first-guess value for the odds of a launch and operational failure. Such a calculation would be rife with guesswork and assumptions, of course, but at least it would be a starting point. Instead, they assume that any situation that hasn’t caused trouble in the past, even if it exceeds safety limits or deals with a phenomenon unconsidered by Shuttle designers, just isn’t a problem.
As for doing it “the old, unsafe way,” it doesn’t appear the Band-Aids that have been applied have done anything to mitigate the problem, much less address the root cause.
You’re correct; the foam problem has existed since Day 1. That it has continued to–allowed to–exist, despite warnings from engineers and physical evidence of damage is emblematic of the core problem; not that the Shuttle is a complicated, failure-prone design, or that space travel is inherently dangerous, but that NASA addresses known, repeated problems by ignoring them, and justifying their deliberate obtuseness by arguing that since the failures haven’t yet resulted in a catastrophic accident that they must not be any kind of problem.
This is not irrational stuff; if the Shuttle were hit by a piece of orbital debris, or an SME came apart without warning, despite inspection and with no indications of problems, then we could chalk it up to the normal hazards of spaceflight and the dangers of engineering a design with low safety margins. These are the kind of hazards that the astronauts and the space program has to accept. But the problems that resulted in the loss of Challenger and Columbia were well-documented and were ignored by the brass for years. They are problems that could have been fixed–not without expense of course, but correctible nonetheless–but instead NASA managers have relied on risk projections that go beyond optimistic and dive headfirst into fantasy.
What is objectionable in the use of terms like “test flight” and “goof” is that this clearly isn’t a test flight, what with five nonessential crewmembers aboard, and two and a half years spent attacking a potentially catastrophic problem with bailing wire and white paint to no effect whatsoever goes way beyond “goof” and into misstep, blunder, or foul up. For NASA, this is SNAFU[sup]*[/sup].
Maybe because they are more careful in their choice of words than the general public, and you. The Challenger did not “explode”, even though it may have looked like that on the launch video. Structural failure led to the rupture of the external tank and the orbiter was torn apart by aerodynamic loads that exceeded its design limits.
The ignition of the fuel from the ruptured external tank was a secondary result of the accident. It was not the primary cause of the accident, and the fuel deflagrated (burned rapidly), it didn’t detonate.
The orbiter broke up due to aerodynamic forces that exceeded its design limits. These aerodynamic forces were the result of loss of attitude control at high speed. Attitude control was lost because of the structural failure of the stack.
Think of it like a fighter aircraft that loses a wing while traveling at high speed. The loss of the wing will produce forces that cause the aircraft to lose attitude control. Once the aircraft starts to yaw, aerodynamic forces will cause it to break up. The airframe isn’t strong enough to fly sideways at high speed. The aircraft’s fuel tanks may rupture and the spilled fuel may ignite, but that is a secondary effect.
You asked me why I thought I’d be able to get things done if I was there as opposed to the folks who are currently mismanaging the show, and I’ve explained it to you.
You don’t know any engineers, do you? An engineer’s first instinct is to speak in jargon and not layman’s terms like “goof.” For him to say “goof” means one of two things: Either he’s not taking things seriously, or someone (namely a high paid marketing and PR firm) “fed” the term to him, in order to downplay the matter. IOW, NASA’s covering shit up again. Not good. Lest you think that I’m expecting too much of Griffin to think like an engineer when his current position is that of head of NASA, you need to take a look at his record. And here you can find a speech (warning PDF file!) where he describes himself as “King Nerd” and says the following:
My brother workd for NASA subcontractor for a few years. He seems to have had a lot of respect for every engineer (who was functioning as an engineer) at NASA. However, he had a pretty low opinion of just about every project manager he encountered among the subcontractors and the further he got from real engineering, either among the subcontractors or in NASA, the lower his opinion got. My brother is not someone who simply hates management, but over and over he saw engineers bring up serious issues about one project or another, only to be told that they were interfering with target dates and that they needed to shut up and “do their job.” :rolleyes: Shooting the messenger seemed to be the preferred method of dealing with any problem that was pointed out. (These were not all safety issues, but we have already seen how closely safety issues match the pattern he described. And while he has since left the subcontractor, his tenure definitely covered the period when they were supposedly making the current shuttles safe.)
It is entirely possible that the guys at the very top sincerely want to know the facts, but the culture of avoidance and denial is so embedded in the middle to upper management of the guys doing the work that it may be impossible for them to get an honest answer.
I can verify this. Schedule is the master. On the one hand, we are told to make sure everything is right and correct, both thechnically and contractually. On the other hand when we do bring up problems, the company’s upper management goes to NASA (an end run) and accuses us of “causing delays”. Guess who NASA sides with. Then after the item (whatever it is) turns out to be crap, NASA tries to beat on us for it. It happened again just this year. On the Space Station, there are what we call beta Gimbals. They are sort of like oversized and overpriced rotors for turning the solar arrays towards the sun. They are crap. They always have been crap. QA on them stinks. We flagged the problems - they don’t work, the documentation stinks out loud, and the company doesn’t even follow their own procedures or wiring diagrams. A NASA big wig told us to close out the books (Buy it off). Then later, he tried to deny telling us to do this. Our boss, a Navy Commander, went batshit just like the rest of us. But, the damage had been done. What saved us was, we had a voice recording and verbatim transcription of what this snake had told us to do.
“Explode” doesn’t always mean “detonate”, you know. It can also mean “to shatter with a loud noise” or “to change state or appearance suddenly”. While there was no detonation, Challenger certainly did shatter with a loud nose and took on a sudden change of state and appearance.
Whistle blowers are important, and I’m glad to see that you have taken up that mantle, but being someone who’s “not afraid to step on toes” does not automatically make one immune from making mistakes.
The guys from South Park are also not afraid to step on toes. That doesn’t mean they’d be better at launching the Shuttle than the people in NASA.
Yes, I have known engineers, and they have actually been known to use words that aren’t jargon. Like “King Nerd” for example.
False dilemma. Can you really not think of a third possibility? Try hard.
I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t follow. Using the word “goof” = covering shit up? You are in tin foil hat territory.
See above. The very fact that he says “King Nerd” undermines your point.
‘Jargon’ as JARGON.TXT defines it and ‘jargon’ as the OED defines it are two different things. The Jargon File defines jargon as the terms and meanings specific to the hacker culture, which only partly includes the ‘techspeak’ that the OED (and other mainstream dictionaries) defines as jargon.
(This odd definition goes back to the 1960s, when the file JARGON.TXT was created on an ITS machine to document the hacker culture that had sprung up in the various networked PDP-10 shops and, later, the various networked Unix shops.)