"spaceflight is risky business" explains the tweet. i mean, yes, space is a hostile environment, but so is nasa.
i think about how the apollo 1 astronauts sent a picture to their boss' boss, of them praying towards the capsule, a few months before they burned to death in a test.
during the investigation, one senator said NASA had an "evasiveness, ... lack of candor, ... patronizing attitude toward Congress ... refusal to respond fully and forthrightly to legitimate Congressional inquiries"
i also think about the challenger disaster. the one where the rocket contractor went "don't fly" and nasa went "are you suuuuuuuuuuure?" and the contractor went "shrug."
i think about how the investigation only found out the truth because someone leaked the reports to the commission—who then protected their sources by inviting feynman over for dinner, and theatrically working on their car and talking about o-rings, so he'd have an excuse to start looking.
"The commission concluded that the safety culture and management structure at NASA were insufficient to properly report, analyze, and prevent flight issues."
or columbia, where the the management cancelled attempts to look for debris, because it would ruin the schedule.
"the board determined that NASA lacked the appropriate communication and integration channels to allow problems to be discussed and effectively routed and addressed."
the thing that gets me, apart from nasa killing astronauts every twenty years, is that so many people see it as an acceptable cost of progress. if anything, they see it proving the difficulty and the merit of spaceflight.
i'll give you two guesses for how the people who make "self driving cars" think
i was going to try to post something longer about that but then the core nugget of that thought fit in the title
it's politically motivated, to a fault sometimes. I'll sometimes talk (and i've done so before) about how the organizational structure of NASA as an offshoot of Johnson's Great Society initiative let it set down roots to evade political cancellation and how that allowed it to bring benefits to places across the country but like.
why did we approve the Challenger launch, instead of delaying it for better weather? They wanted it up ahead of Reagan's State of the Union address, so he could talk about it. It bears saying that they launched not just in temperatures outside their launch constraints, but upper level wind shear, and the combination of those is what led to the failure. SRBs had failed in that manner before, but the hot exhaust gases had ended up welding the seam shut when the o-ring failed. The wind shear practically "held the wound open," as it were.
why did they approve the Columbia launch, when the left bipod ramp insulation foam piece had been documented as coming off several times, including the mission one or two flights before? political pressure to have the station "Core Complete" by 2005 or whatever.
Why were we so gung-ho on Apollo that we were willing to take unforeseen levels of risk? Political pressure. Man, moon, decade, beat the soviets, et cetera.
more reasoning after the cut
Why weren't foam strikes or SRB blowby taken seriously, despite having been documented in their own respects from the onset of the shuttle program? Despite the near loss of STS-27 (a military mission) to debris falling onto the orbiter (granted, it was from the SRB nosecone, not the tank) just two flights after Challenger?
"they're just maintenance issues, the shuttle has survived them before, we 'understand the nature of the problem' sure. you understand it, until the debris hits somewhere critical or the "understood process" of SRBs blow-by being countered by exhaust heat-welding fails to seal the joint.
Why was the apollo CSM that killed the apollo 1 astronauts designed in that way? Because they were rushing, this was an early test version of the CSM (i think that's the right video) that was intended as a development stopgap while they finalized it. They thought the inward-opening hatch would be fine because they didn't plan on doing any EVAs yet, and hadn't thought about the necessity to evacuate the spacecraft in a pad emergency. The contractor for the CSM made decisions to meet the deadline that made the vehicle less safe before it was done.
I could talk in greater length about the original nugget here, about the whole "rockets are just well-behaved missiles," the militarization of space even as we play "i'm not touching you" with the weaponization of it, and the fact that it's all always the same contractors with little exception, and even when it's new blood it still has to play nice with the DoD. i could even talk about the consolidation of aerospace and defense companies and how that is.
But i've said a lot already i think.
