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lupi
@lupi
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.

NireBryce
@NireBryce

I read the report a decade ago so I'm rusty, but what always stood out to me was we Apollo-13'd apollo 13, but thanks to management culture, budgetary pressure, a lack of imagination, and no communists to one-up, we did not bother to Apollo-13 Columbia. If anything, Columbia had way more resources to pull off an Apollo-13, if NASA was willing to sacrifice the payloads and scientific work.

STS was a heavy lift variant because it wasn't going to dock with the space station ever. It had a large crew of 7 at the time, including a spacehab lab module, and a few other things they could have scavenged if they knew when the NASA debris analysis team first started suspecting. I'm not even thinking about moonshot rescue missions that were proposedwith the reserve shuttle, or the air force classified shuttle. Apollo had 3 people with engineer-brain on it. Columbia had 7. The space shuttle had laptops. It had some form of hand tools, it had a lot more than Apollo did.

managers downplayed the issue, budgetary constraints rushed them and they needed experimental data before the ISS modules launched, etc, sure.

Maneuvering the orbiter to allow its left wing to be imaged would have interrupted ongoing science operations, and Ham dismissed the DoD imaging capabilities as insufficient to assess damage to the orbiter.

Mission management downplayed the risk of the debris strike in communications with the crew.

But they had a spacehab lab module. They had suits for EVA in case something happened -- mention of having to fix an antenna as an example, in a pre-launch Q and A with the public comes up with a cursory websearch.

If we cared about the people and not the payload there was plenty to cannibalize, to create a tether long enough to check, to maybe pull less critical tiles, bring them inside, and hand-sculpt them. There was an entire lab module they could have cannibalized, though I don't know if they had the tools or the time to pull off side panels.

Would it work? Who knows -- no one tried.

And then I found this report tonight, looking for these things, since I was rusty. I'd never seen the followup report. Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report. Somehow I'd missed it when I read the CAIB report. It was released in 2008.

The heated plasma leaking through the wing probably isn't what killed them. I mean it did, but this shows it might have been survivable even if nothing was done in space, were there not a cavalcade of other problems where human life wasn't considered.

which is about how they could have survived the breakup, if people just did a little bit more work on thinking about what might happen. Between poor suit integration and not wanting to rework controls, a lack of upper body restraint and helmets that supported your neck, and parachutes that required manual deployment.

I will put the pull quotes under the fold.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

This whole thing reminds me of this PBS documentary about cell tower fall deaths.

it's, graphic at times.

there's so much subcontracting that by the time the people actually work on the towers, they don't have safety equipment from the last decade. Or at all. And often encourage free climbing, partially due to time pressures.

And all the money for those things are taken by each fractal subcontracting step. You pay nearly the same amount as you did for doing your own towers, and don't think about just how many hops there are hemorrhaging that money.


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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.

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

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.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

I'll add this to my reading list, along with the Rogers commission report.

The Shuttle's pressure vessel was built like a tank, it doesn't surprise me that the crew could have survived the breakup in it.

They did in Challenger. They were alive, unconscious, until the crew cabin hit the Atlantic. Switches were flipped in the cockpit after loss of contact, at least one air pack had been activated.

Though i think the bigger application of schedule pressure was less the State of the Union like it was for Challenger, and more the looming "ISS Core Complete" deadline, which put the rush on ALL shuttle missions, even ones not bound for the ISS like 107. Columbia couldn't even go to the ISS, being the first shuttle built, she was too heavy for it.

oh yeah i may have munged the two in my head re: SOTU.

Columbia had an important ISS payload, "ISS risk mitigation payload" but I can't figure out what it was. I assume micrometeorite whipple shields and a detector or something. So the ISS pressure probably was there in specific, and not just in general.

There was also, iirc, a 5 month delay on the experiments in the lab module, which probably also rushed things. See first point in this FAQ about the mission, before the launch.

It's one of the biggest cases against business-brain management styles, external timelines when it comes to human safety, and strangling the budget of an organization you still want to tear heaven asunder with the might of an open-ended bomb and have everyone get home safe.

Yeah, it could fly things for demonstration FOR the ISS, but it could neverr itself reach the ISS. It never even had the ISS docking adapter installed.

Columbia was the only orbiter to retain the original airlock built into her crew cabin on the middeck. Every other orbiter got it pulled out and replaced with the payload bay mounted airlock/station docking adapter.

But the keyword for that payload is "risk mitigation."

It's flying before you fly. It's proving something works in space by carrying it aboard something else before you deploy it for real. That's what the DoD uses the X-37B for. They put things on it that they wanna test before they install them on their billion dollar spy satellites to make sure they don't end up with goose eggs that take up a whole percentage point of the federal budget.

It was free-flying some system, component, or technology that would've been used on/for station to make sure it checks out in space, before they launched the actual modules.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

It always boils my piss when I hear about local govt stuff like maintenance depots getting wound down because everything's getting moved to private sector maintenance companies because "it saves money", because ... well, yeah, that.

It's gonna cost about the damn same, but now every corner that can be cut is gonna be, so that there can be some profit margin; and then when shit stops working, the public sector gets blamed and "see, if a company was doing this, it'd be so much more efficient"

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