Victim of Blackmailing Scouser
Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: Zürich, Switzerland (But a Brit)
Age: 59
Posts: 113
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Lu,
Before I proceed, I need to state that I think the Challenger accident bears no relation to the dreadful Columbia accident. The NASA management, culture and working practices are very different 17 years on.
I've read your original post three times, and I still don't see what you're trying to say here. Maybe I'm thick, but could you spell it out for me? Words of two syllables or less would be a great help.
The Rogers Commission report is a very famous document indeed. The report summary devotes about a page to the actual reason(s) for the failure, and about twenty other pages to major deficiencies in the NASA management and quality culture at that time. Two pages were devoted to political pressures from Washington!
Basically, what actually brought down the Challenger was almost irrelevent: one of the many zillions of components was bound to fail. Fate happened to select the SRB O-ring on that sad occasion. What really brought the Challenger down was sloppiness, a badly compromised safety culture, and endless political interference by Washington.
Read the report, and you'll see I'm right.
This time around we seem to be faced with some unresolvable design compromises, rather than any actual sloppiness in NASA processes and procedures.
Accusations that the Shuttles are 'too old' are laughable. The damn things are pretty much brand new every time they launch! No, it's just that previously acceptable risks have become unacceptable over the last two decades.
Safety and routineness have been grossly oversold.
TW
Last edited by Tricky Woo; 5th Feb 2003 at 14:42.