NASA 'Schedule Driven' management culture blamed for Shuttle disaster.

[Wig Wag]

From the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3174963.stm

Amongst other things the investigators wrote:

"little by little, Nasa was accepting more and more risk in order to stay on schedule,"

Now, who can honestly say that this does not happen in some airlines these days? Are some carriers not 'schedule driven' ?

Disaster as it was the Shuttle killed seven people.

I wonder how many airline executives will hoist the points in this report on board.

[Mac the Knife]

Eerily similar to the problems identified after the Challenger accident. Same political and financial pressures, same attitudes.

To quote the late, great Richard Feynman (of the Rodgers Commission): "I read all of these reviews and they agonise whether they can go even though they have some blow-by in the seal or they had a cracked blade in the pump of one of the engines, whether they can go next time or this time and they decide yes. Then it flies and nothing happens"

"Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high. For the next flight we can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it this time....It is a kind of Russian roulette."

And the next generation will go be back to the Dynasoar [X-20] style lifting-body spaceplanes that the USAF were forced to abandon in the '70s. Ho-hum...