‘We have a fire in the cockpit!’: the Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later | Hacker News Reader

‘We have a fire in the cockpit!’: the Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later

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48 pointsHooke20 comments

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Ars Technica story that was on the front page a couple of days back: https://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/01/apollo-1-fire-inve...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13478422

In that discussion, see the comment of "19670127", he first say he remembered "Batman" to be interrupted on ABC with the news. Then he discovered that "Batman" wasn't in ABC's Friday prime time schedule. Is it possible that the described interruption happened before the prime time?

The event happened 23:31:19 UTC Jan 27 1967, says Wikipedia.

> It was a lesson NASA would have to learn again after the space shuttle Challenger disaster. And again after the space shuttle Columbia disaster.

So... it's a lesson NASA hasn't learned?

I see the same phenomenon in the software industry (with less terrible consequences) where attention to quality spikes after disasters and then subsides over time as complacency sets back in.

It happens basically everywhere, including politics.

I can't help but wonder if it comes down to a generational thing.

Each of these happened with roughly 20 years between them. Enough time for the senior engineers and such that experienced the last one to have left for some reason or other.

And as computers gets involved everywhere, expect software issues to have ever more fatal consequences.

Another interesting point is that ease of opening the hatch was a tradeoff that was pushed back and forth by (near) accidents. Mercury had a pyrotechnic hatch release mechanism. That triggered accidentally on Mercury-Redstone 4, which caused the approach to be changed for Apollo. The hatch on Apollo 1 had mechanical latching mechanism and was moved manually. Apollo 1 accident caused the hatch on later Apollos to have still mechanical latches, but easier to operate, and pneumatic mechanism that lifted the hatch.

I think the term for this phenomenon is the 'normalisation of deviance'.

I don't think that Challenger and Columbia suffered the same problems. They weren't even close.

Unless the problem is "there was some lack of understanding in the potential danger of it, and everything should be aborted setting a lower acceptable risk", or something like that.

Which would not only impacted and prevented Challenger and Columbia, but would have stopped probably all other missions, since it's impossible to know for sure how high or low the acceptable-risk-bar should be put.

Didn't Feynman famously conclude that Challenger was largely to the blame of a culture that didn't respect safety over timeline and budget? That part felt a lot like Apollo 1. I recall reading that there was a fundamental ignorance at critical levels of management t on how risk is even measured.

Yes, in the end it can be disrespect for safety... but in the long run, it's easy to miss details that can lead to problems or disasters.

Sometimes one person misses reporting something that seemed to be small, but have consequences. Sometimes one reports so much because, well, "hey I warned", but it gets lost on many others warnings that were issued and didn't happen, and people aren't sensitive to warnings anymore.

It's not easy to set the limit on where everybody should be worried and where it's just acceptable or even noticed.

I must admit that I first started reading about the details from the Apollo 1 disaster after hearing the Public Service Broadcasting[0] song "Fire In The Cockpit" from their "Race for Space" album. The album is a concept album about the American and Soviet space race using samples from various speeches, news shows and NASA public relation stuff.

The band says about the song (which they never play at their live shows):

> "The fire on Apollo 1 was such an important and terrible chapter in the program that it felt wrong to leave it out of our version of the story. [...] We wanted to treat it with respect and not come up with some trite or overly emotional song, so we just kept it very, very simple and tried to pay a quiet, but terrifying tribute to those three men."[0]

There is so much historic stuff in this album that I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of space missions.

[0] http://publicservicebroadcasting.net/ [1] http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=37821

Also, tomorrow is 31 years since Challenger:

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0128.h...

I was in 8th grade. People still watched the shuttle launches on TV then. It was on in many of the classrooms, but the bell rang to switch periods shortly before launch. I was moving between rooms when I heard someone say something about an explosion. I ducked into the nearest room where the TV was on. I'll never forgot the images of that day.

Also, Feb 1 will be 14 years for Columbia. It never occurred to me before how close together on the calendar all three events are.

I guess this 'web' link trick doesn't work anymore

It appears to work inconsistently. I agree it's frustrating. It just worked for me, though it sometimes hasn't in the past. I haven't yet figured out the difference.

Can it be due to some browser privacy setting/extension interfering with (hidding) the referrer?

Not in my case. I haven't made any changes to my browser setup between attempts.

This is probably a really stupid question (yet to have my morning cup of earl grey), but which failing trick are you referring to?

There's a link called "web" on this page that links to Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%98We%20have%20a%20fir...

It lets you into news sites that have some sort of paywall/registration requirement, but that whitelist Google.

Isn't that cloaking which is against Google's webmaster guidelines? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en

[EDIT] Apparently they have added "First click free" policy https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en

Right click the web link and open it in an incognito window (or your browser's equivalent).

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