This post has content warnings for: engineering disasters, human factors, this is still about the subbmarine but first we have to talk about both space shuttle disasters.
what now???
- (th)ey
- entangled.one/
"i have done a couple bad things"
number of years i have lived on this earth
over 30
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in reply to @lupi's post:
I could've even brought up the 737 Max really.
I'm just not super versed in it, and everything else I practically knew from heart.
Machines are only as safe as the culture that produces them. That's the llimiting factor. The Shuttle could have had a perfect safety record, even with its design compromises, if it had a rocksteady managment backing it.
I will NEVER forgive Boeing for the 737 Max disasters. A friend of mine died on one of those accidents, all so the C-suites could add a few extra dollars to their bonuses.
Part of it was crunch. I remember being in the office and we were actually seriously talking about getting cots rather than continuing to go to the hostel down the street. I was leaving the office at 11 PM to come in at 7 in the morning on the good days. Max 737 broke me and I don't think I will ever fully recover.
I can't think of anything insightful to add here, everything I try to say sounds stupid, but I wanted to thank you for adding your story here regardless because fucking hell, yeah.
Nearly every "engineering disaster" had poor decision processes and even neglect on behalf of management or the designer. Especially the bit about this guy being inspired by spaceX makes me so upset.
something you mention in here is the idea that a lot of the time the people rejecting an effective safety culture genuinely believe that It’s Fine As Is. i feel like stockton rush being on board this dive (rumored for a bit and finally confirmed by the company, who knows why it took them that long) indicates that he really was high on his own supply. despite all evidence to the contrary, he thought it was safe, or at least Safe Enough.
Yeah, he really truly believes it. In everything he says, everything that gives anyone who's been through this before EXTREME pause...
He really does.
In a 2019 interview with Smithsonian magazine, Rush complained that the industry’s approach was stifling innovation.
“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years,” he said. “It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations.”
I linked this example in another downstream comment, but y'know. It's still in my clipboard, so.
Yeah @Cariad posted a faq asking “why isn’t Titan classed” and it said innovation like three times in the answer. If your answer to safety questions includes the word “innovation” more than once, it’s a miracle you haven’t killed anyone yet and it probably won’t last much longer.
yep! the same FAQ that tries to imply that space tourist companies are role models for being unregulated, when.
They are Extremely regulated, and have been ever since VSS Enterprise took a life.
SpaceX's crew vehicles spent years in development with extensive NASA oversight for human rating. They're selling seats on them to tourists now, sure, but they were developed to the most stringent NASA standards for carrying humans.
I find it interesting that you use NASA standards to explain SpaceX's apparently-better safety record after just talking about how NASA's safety standards were decayed and ultimately failed in 1986, and then failed in the same way in 2003.
I'm not going at you for defending SpaceX or trying to catch you in a gotcha or anything! Rather I think it's interesting that the culture of safety around the US human spaceflight programme is so pervasive that it crops up as shorthand, seemingly involuntarily. We seem to want to believe that, because the activity is so dangerous, the engineering is so challenging and the stakes are so high, failure just couldn't be allowed. The ships can't sink. I certainly find myself thinking that way.
I'm using Dragon specifically and the fact it was developed with extensive NASA oversight specifically because Oceangate themselves, in their FAQ about why the submarine isn't certed or classed, cites SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic as "companies that operate outside of regulation successfully (presumably in the context of operating space tourism, as that's the only reason to include SpaceX)
they're implying all three companies are operating outside regulation when all three are in fact heavily regulated and overseen.
for SpaceX it was a contract requirement. for Blue and Virgin it was regulation written in blood after the first life taken.
I took Oceangate at their word to debunk their claim. They claimed all three were unregulated and moving fast and doing okay doing so. that is not the case.
I wasn't intending to compare Shuttle and Dragon's safety records, but I see how what I wrote got read that way, I should have directly cited and linked that post to better delineate things.
EDIT: adding an excerpt to the post to make it more clear that's what I'm referring to, thanks for pointing out things
Also, commercial human spaceflight in the US will be under stricter regulation as moratorium on regulations expired recently.
ah is THAT why today was the last flight of VSS Unity, last one they could get away with before they moved to a hopefully-safer spaceshipthree design
A relative of mine (being slightly vague on purpose here) works at NASA in safety and they told me a lot of the contributing factors, but he mostly blamed appointed management (i.e. presidential admin and congress). Also, how little certain contractors were vetted (read up on the O-Ring designer/manufacture. hint: they show up on an episode of Last Podcast on the Left). Also the shuttle was bigger than it was designed to be to accommodate some weird Cold War BS.
yep. There's a reason Hubble fits perfectly. Hubble wasn't exactly an original, unique assembly, it was... a repurposed chassis, to say the least.
It was for lofting KH-11s. If you look enough note a very convergent fairing and payload bay size among launchers, Falcon excepted because they chose not to make themselves eligible for those specific payloads.