Shuttle a deathtrap, says astronaut

[qso1]

I agree with Calli on the causes of both accidents being traceable to NASA management culture. This would seem to indicate that the flawed, inherantly unsafe, shuttle design still has yet to have an accident that is not somehow traceable to management. A bonifide hardware failure resulting from...hardware failure!<br /><br />The type of failure that when investigated, the report would simply conclude that shuttle failure resulted from whatever. Not whatever traceable to ignorance of management or engineers. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

Actually, I would contend that the root cause of the Columbia accident was not launching out of constraints (a management failure) but a failure in the design of the insulation on the ET. It had that problem since day one, but the seriousness of the problem was not properly appreciated by upper management until STS-107.<br /><br />In engineering-speak, this would be termed an "escape" -- a problem injected in one phase but detected in another. It was injected in the design phase but not detected until well into the operational phase of the program. What allowed this design problem to escape was, indeed, a management problem. I recently read "Comm Check" and it details the thinking of upper management. They genuinely did not realize the seriousness of the situation. I don't think it's a problem of bad culture in this case, or a problem of pointy-haired bosses. I think the real problem was process-oriented. Concerns simply weren't filtering up the pipe as they should've. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[qso1]

Either way, the Columbia accident still holds the shuttle to one hardware (Non engineer management traceable) failure in 113 missions which may not be much better than unmanned launches but still low percentage wise.<br /><br />Put another way, one has a much higher risk of getting divorced than dying in a shuttle accident LOL.<br /><br />The other point about pointy haired bosses. In the Apollo 1 fire portrayal of NASA management represented by Harrison Storms (Tom Hanks HBO From The Earth To The Moon), he is seen breaking down in his chair, obviously upset at what had happened. This I believe was one of the most accurate portrayals of how managers really reacted. We out in the regular world do not see this side of accidents such as Apollo 1, Challenger, or Columbia. They are people like the rest of us and have flaws which occassionally lead to bad decisions, usually in a group setting.<br /><br />And its not restricted to just the American programs. Little is known of the Russian reactions to their disasters which resulted in the popular notion here in America that when a Russian vehicle fails, they grab another Cosmonaut and send him up. When someone I once knew said this, I pointed out their two major disasters resulted in long downtimes for their manned programs as well. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

Absolutely. If you have not already read it, you may want to look for a copy of "Comm Check". It's just agonizing to read a lot of it. It really puts a human face on everyone involved. It's very hard to feel angry at anyone afterwards, because of the hell they put themselves through in the aftermath.<br /><br />You are quite right about the Russian space program too. It's unfortunate that less is known about the people within it and their reactions, but yeah, there were very long downtimes after things like the Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 accidents. Arguably, rushing Soyuz 1 into flight before it was ready contributed to their loss in the moon race; the failure of Soyuz 1 probably set them back more than the delay to get it done right would've. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[mlorrey]

More hyperbole from nolirogari. I challenge you to drive that van around DC for the same number of HOURS as the shuttles have spent in orbit. I frankly don't give a damn what the miles are: it isn't the flying that kills you, its the landing.<br /><br />Airline operations are incredibly safe: about 0.001 fatality per million passenger miles. Far safer than driving on a road anywhere. If safety is a matter of being in the air and going fast, why isn't airline flying less safe than driving your car? <br /><br />I'm safer flying on an airliner than sitting on my own toilet: on an airliner, I have highly trained attendants with first responder, survival, and crash safety training on hand. Alone in my home, sitting on the can, in rural NH, there is nobody who can help me in a personal health emergency. The only thing that really sucks about flying is average citizens are denied their 2nd amendment rights (note: there was never a hijacking of an airliner in the US until after the FAA banned carrying firearms on planes).<br /><br />Shuttles crash in 1 in 57 flights. That is incredibly dangerous, more dangerous than most launchers that are not considered 'man rated'. It IS a deathtrap, an only the insane or those desperately dependent upon STS for their employment would continue to argue otherwise.<br /><br />Flying a shuttle is more dangerous than parachuting without a reserve chute, more dangerous than hangliding blind.<br /><br />Oh, and if you haven't done at least several dozen deadstick landings on a simulator of the plane you are flying, you shouldn't be in the pilots seat.

 

[mlorrey]

That is a problem with government bureaucracies, Calli: they are not designed to get important information to the top of the pile, they are designed to insulate top people from politically embarassing facts and filter out crucial information. Every level generates reports for the levels above, and every manager who manages by reading executive summaries is a weak link that blocks important information from getting through....

 

[rocketwatcher2001]

<font color="yellow">Shuttles crash in 1 in 57 flights. That is incredibly dangerous, more dangerous than most launchers that are not considered 'man rated'. It IS a deathtrap, an only the insane or those desperately dependent upon STS for their employment would continue to argue otherwise.</font><br /><br />One in fifty seven? Sounds about like the Soyuz. The Soyuz has had about 200 launches, and four have "crashed", killing two crews. The other two crews got lucky, especially the crew coming in at 20 negative G's until the capsule broke free and flipped around the right way. A few more seconds and the hatch would have burned through.<br /><br />The one in fifty seven is better than Apollo, which lost one crew on the ground, and almost lost another in space. If Apollo 8 had 13's O2 tank, the crew wouldn't have survived.<br /><br />Sure the shuttle is a "deathtrap", not that I like, or even agree with, that term here. But if somebody wants to call it a deathtrap, they can, but only if they concede that every other spacecraft is a deathtrap as well. So far, only the Chinese have not lost a crew in space, but I'm sure they will. That's not to say that I'm hoping for it, I'd love to see everybody make it back from all of their missions, from whatever country they fly from, but I just don't expect it. The "Demon" has ways of getting us that we have yet to discover, sometimes we discover them before people get killed, often times not.<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>That is a problem with government bureaucracies, Calli: they are not designed to get important information to the top of the pile, they are designed to insulate top people from politically embarassing facts and filter out crucial information.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />You seem to think this situation is the result of a conspiracy (conscious or otherwise) or at least grossly unethical behavior on the part of management. This is not generally the case. Certainly it does happen, but any organization above a certain size is inevitably going to have this problem. It is not a function of managment being jerks. It's a function of there being more data flowing through the organization than any one person can possibly manage by themselves. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[mlorrey]

Hierocratic bureaucracies cannot avoid this issue, because there is a natural limit to the number of people one person can manage, and amount of information one person can process. A proper maximum ratio for any system is seven underlings for each manager, with fewer for managers closer to the actual work if they are going to do any actual work beyond mananging people.<br /><br />As a cell structure, a pyramidal bureaucracy is going to suffer massive failures the higher in the pyramid that incompetent people rise, and that is the natural evolution: people rise to their own level of incompetence (known in Managment circles as "The Peter Principle"). It is not a function of people being jerks, it is a function of individuals aspiring to career advancement beyond their actual competence, through means other than development of actual competence.<br /><br />This behavior does happen in large corporate cultures as well, make no mistake. Lockheed and Boeing suffer from similar problems, like GM, Ford, and Chrysler. The advantage private ventures have is that the profit motive ensures that some metrics of quantitative performance remain in place to weed out the truly incompetent, sometimes more often than not. In government, there is no such incentive.<br /><br />As a result, government bureaucracies tend to sit on information that could be seen by those who are supposed to relay it as detrimental to their career enhancement, because nobody has an incentive to pass on information that is crucial to next quarters profit statement: there is no profit statement to mandate such cruciality.<br /><br />Three times in my life I've been told "there is no hidden agenda" when I questioned the actions of superiors. Every time, it was said by a government bureaucrat, and every time, I was about to get massively screwed within a day or two.<br /><br />Bureaucracies, unlike business, are quite capable of handling failure. Business needs failure to motivate it to improve or die and get out of the

 

[radarredux]

> <i><font color="yellow">but any organization above a certain size is inevitably going to have this problem. It is not a function of managment being jerks.</font>/i><br /><br />I largely agree that the government is not dissimilar from other large organizations, but other large organizations are required to adapt or suffer. The government, by its natural monopoly, does not.<br /><br />For example, Ford has made some major screw ups over the years, and now they are forced to cut 20-25% of their workforce to avoid collapse. Likewise, many of the major airlines have had to go back to their unions to get major salary and benefit concessions. Can you imagine the US Government reducing its total work force by 1/4, or reducing the salaries of the civil servants by 30%?<br /><br />Large private companies aren't any better than government, its just that market forces eventually force them to correct things or die. Governments just go on and on.</i>

 

[CalliArcale]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>This behavior does happen in large corporate cultures as well, make no mistake. Lockheed and Boeing suffer from similar problems, like GM, Ford, and Chrysler. The advantage private ventures have is that the profit motive ensures that some metrics of quantitative performance remain in place to weed out the truly incompetent, sometimes more often than not. In government, there is no such incentive. <p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />I'm not sure how it is in the actual government itself, but I can testify that there's a strong move in the government to require its <i>contractors</i> to apply quantitative management -- specifically, that addressed in CMMI. (I don't recall off the top of my head which CMMI level introduces quantitative management. I want to say 4.) It's very good stuff, and I think a lot of organizations could benefit tremendously from it. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[steve82]

One of the problems the government has in span of control and the rule of 7's is that a lot of the organizations are matrixed. Instead of a top-down heirarchical structure, people tend to be answerable to multiple managers on different projects that may or may not be related. A typical NASA contractor engineer may have 5 or 6 different charge numbers he has to put on his timecard each week covering different projects or whether he was evaluating software enhancements or assessing software discrepancies, yada yada. Then on top of that he has to be accurate to a tenth of an hour in each category he charges to and has to make his own judgement calls like, "Did I assess a problem or recommend a change when I was on the phone with Al the other day, and for how long?" It's really a miracle that anything gets done.<br />A typical manager in such an organization often requires inputs from people he has no authority over to get his job done. His span of responsibility exceeds his span of authority.

 

[john_316]

Does Boeing and Lockmart or Orbital for this matter operate in the same matter? No C.O.C like the armed forces? <br /><br />I mean if the USA (United Space Alliance) operates more efficiently why not adopt that as its TQM (total qaulity management) "sigh" a term I havent used in over a decade....<br /><br />Any thoughts?<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br /><br />

 

[steve82]

Oh there's a Chain of Command. There are commanders all over the place. The level of matrixing depends on the type of contract, whether it is strictly developmental or a general support contract. I worked on a contract that was so complicated once and had such a convoluted management structure on both the NASA and contractor side that we had our own metrics office who's job it was to produce a report every month showing NASA how well we were doing. Funny, we got 97's all the time.

 

[jeff10]

Actually, it's unfortunate for NASA that their disasters are such high-profile events because the reality is that every organization (businesses included) suffers from organization failure. For example, take Enron. Why are there so many corporate scandals? Because underlings who know the truth can't afford to say or reveal things their bosses don't like. <br /><br />Whatever your view of Mike Mullane, the reality is that in both Challenger's and Columbia's cases, it was more a failure of the organization than the shuttle design itself. The design/o-ring problems were already known to the top bosses, who chose to ignore them. You can call it a design failure only if engineers had said the design was perfect, and then the shuttles crashed. <br /><br />Top-down organizations (which means all) don't like bad news. So anyone with bad news or uncomfortable questions is going to keep his/her mouth tightly shut. It would be stupid to do otherwise - why risk being fired? Sure, you can be heroic - but only if you have millions in the bank or have no family to support. It really does come down to that - are you willing to risk your family security/house/car/kids' college education/your career over a subject something that no one is willing to talk about openly? As Mullane himself was quoted, "'It's not like other jobs, where if you get frustrated you can go in to your boss and say "Shove it!" You can't do that at Nasa because there's no other place to go fly shuttles.'" (The paper 'why your boss is programmed to be a dictator' uses NASA as a case study - it's worth reading http://www.changethis.com/19.BossDictator)

 

[CalliArcale]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Does Boeing and Lockmart or Orbital for this matter operate in the same matter? No C.O.C like the armed forces?<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Yes, they do operate in the same manner. Most defense contractors do. There are actually strengths to the approach -- for one thing, you can have 28.6 people working on a program. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> But as noted, it has drawbacks too. It has to be implemented right or it'll actually leave a company worse off than it was before. The most crucial thing is that the functional management has to be on top of things, aware of what program management is doing, what it needs, and how best to serve those needs. If functional management starts thinking that program management exists purely to fund the department's people, then there's a problem.<br /><br /><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>I mean if the USA (United Space Alliance) operates more efficiently why not adopt that as its TQM (total qaulity management) "sigh" a term I havent used in over a decade.... <p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />USA has a significant advantage: it doesn't work so many contracts. It exists to serve the Space Shuttle program. A company like Boeing or Lockheed will have literally thousands of contracts. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[carp]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-01-25-challenger-edit_x.htm

 

[hold]

This is Astronaut Mike Mullane. Obviously I should have learned what a “blog” is sooner and visited this one several days ago. Everybody please understand…I’ve NEVER said the shuttle is a deathtrap. EVER. This “quote” was contrived by a reporter for a London newspaper…a reporter who never interviewed me. Let me tell you what I have said in my numerous press interviews associated with the release of my new book, Riding Rockets. When I have been asked about the Challenger, the shuttle design, etc., my replies have mimicked the current NASA Administrator’s Congressional testimony. Administrator Michael Griffin has said something along the line, “The shuttle is a flawed design. It has no crew escape system.” (As someone who is editorializing about being misquoted, I should emphasize what I have in quotes above is an approximate quote by Administrator Michael Griffin. I don’t have his exact words in front of me.) Griffin then went on to say words to the effect that, because human perfection is unattainable, if we continue to fly the shuttle for the indefinite future we might have another tragedy and lose another crew. This was a preamble to his decision to fly the shuttle the minimum number of times to build out the international space station and then retire it in 2010. I support Michael Griffin’s plan and I have said it in multiple interviews. In fact, I say it in the Epilogue of my book. But somehow the “Guardian” and “Observer” newspaper reporter(s) took these comments to fashion my “quote” that the shuttle is a “deathtrap.” In a Fox & Friends interview on 1/25/06, I was asked about this deathtrap statement and refuted it with the same explanation as I’ve given above. I also sent a letter to the Guardian editor explaining I have never made a “deathtrap” statement (fat chance that letter got published). I also sent an email to the current astronaut corps and NASA Public Affairs saying the Guardian headline was bogus. I thought that was the end of

 

[darkenfast]

Thank you for the clarification. Newspapers (especially the headline editors) routinely twist, distort or sometimes completely fabricate in order to sell copies and advance their careers (or work a political agenda). People around the space program should know better and treat these sorts of articles very carefully.

 

[earth_bound_misfit]

Thanks for poppng in and clearing that up Mike. I'm sorry that you had to come here to clear your name, some of our posters should've guessed the "deathtrap" remark was fabricated by some less than savoury media types.<br /><br />Anyhow please feel free to hang around, read some of the interesting threads and post your comments. In here you will be able to converse and swap ideas with some Engineers. One in-particular is Shuttle_guy whos been helping launch machines into space since Appollo (IIRC).<br />Regards EBM. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------- </p><p>Wanna see this site looking like the old SDC uplink?</p><p>Go here to see how: <strong>SDC Eye saver </strong>  </p> </div>

 

[mattblack]

Thank you, Sir.<br /><br />Mike Griffin's original Shuttle comments, hopefully not edited too much, are here:<br /><br />http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-09-27-nasa-griffin-interview_x.htm<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p>One Percent of Federal Funding For Space: America <strong><em><u>CAN</u></em></strong> Afford it!!  LEO is a <strong><em>Prison</em></strong> -- It's time for a <em><strong>JAILBREAK</strong></em>!!</p> </div>

 

[nolirogari]

That does it Mike! I'm going out and buying a copy of your book.<br /><br />If I like it... it goes on the shelf with the other astro's books that I read on long road trips... if I don't... you show up in the Klyde Morris cartoon strip... or worse yet, as a character in "The Program" cartoon. (Hey... I gotta get my money back somehow.) All kidding aside- I'll buy and read and hope to be inspired.