Poop and Soda Bottles Threaten Air Force Rocket Program, Investigators Say
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Could you imagine being so micromanaged that you'd literally need the Federal Government to change a manual to approve a tool you need?
It may seem like micromanagement, but small seemingly meaningless deviations from procedure can add up to big problems, particularly when dealing with space.
Also, it takes an extremely precise sequence of events to cause a nuclear detonation. A nearby explosion is not enough to do it, as you can obviously see here.
tldr; The socket didn't properly fit the wrench and they had to manually hold the socket on the end of the wrench. One man dropped the socket, which fell through a small gap between the walkway and missile. The torque wrench was large enough that it would not have slipped through this gap if/when dropped.
If you're dealing with technology so complicated that one person cannot simultaneously design and repair / maintain it, then whoever performs the latter doesn't possess all the knowledge of the former.
Maybe they used an flammable alloy under certain conditions for engineering reasons.
Most metal doesn't burn. But do you want repair / maintenance techs making that assumption?
Multiple by 100,000 parts.
PS: A more realistic example was one of the Skunk Works projects. I forget the details, but either tools of special metallic composition or wooden tools had to be used to avoid damaging the flight characteristics of the aircraft.
Livingston died as a result of that explosion.
This seems tragic to me. I can't believe someone would "order" him back into the silo to turn on an exhaust fan. First, starting a fan motor inside of an explosive environment can be dangerous. Second, how could someone have such disregard for another person's life, that they send him into a room full of explosive gas?
Perhaps the stakes seemed so high, they felt the only way to stop the warhead from scattering radiation in a resulting explosion was to exhaust the silo.
Ordering people to take potentially fatal risks to avoid greater harms is not merely recurrent within the military, it's fundamental to it.
That doesn't mean that there can't be room to debate whether a particular risk ordered was warranted, but one absolutely should not be shocked that a military superior ordered a subordinate to do something that involves a potentially fatal risk.
This is the military: it’s sad but not out of scope to order someone to do something dangerous, or even likely fatal, in order to accomplish an objective. Consider “you stay here with this machine gun while the rest of us go back the way we came.”
I can't remember which fusing system was on that warhead (though the book describes it in detail) but I think it was one of the more sophisticated kinds than the simple "one point safety" fuses and that the warhead was basically never in danger of exploding.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/634/...
> In 1980, deep in a nuclear missile silo in Arkansas, a simple human error nearly caused the destruction of a giant portion of the Midwest.
Spoiler: at a critical point, it involves a technician improvising with the wrong tool.
I was actually working for a company that was a subcontractor to the USAF in the distant past. There is little room for individual creativity and ingenious problem solving in such a process heavy environment. It's actually like trying to work on an engineering project with Siri. The outcome of this is that only the problems allowed to be solved by the process are solved and none of the risks not identified by the process are reported, because it's too much paperwork already if you find a new one and you're not going to want your job to get any harder.
Ergo, all unidentified risks get taken because they are attractive solutions to many problems. Looking at the spanner incident pointed out by two sibling comments, the "dont carry heavy tools or anchor then when working on the big explodey thing" rule was not enforced and double-checked but hundreds of minor rules with precisely no benefit were being applied. Someone knew of that risk but didn't put the mitigation in place, probably because it was too hard.
Now military rigour and all of that doesn't like to be seen to be a turd sieve of a process so what happens is the answer is to add more processes, not look at the fundamental problem in the approach.
Overall, you need to focus on the key places where risk is considered high, but for most things, meh. Listening to people and making sure risk is managed effectively is a win.
What is that number? And do we know that the number would be less without these types of regulations?
> Looking at the spanner incident pointed out by two sibling comments, the "dont carry heavy tools or anchor then when working on the big explodey thing" rule was not enforced and double-checked
My understanding from listening to the podcast episode (this morning) is that the tool-anchoring rules were only added after that particular disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
I guess it depends on your definition of "near world destroying accidents".
Using the right tool gets us to the moon. Complaining about how micromanagement stifles one's creative vision is how we get the shit show we call "software" today. Somewhere in the middle I'm sure there's a happy medium.
First: you are misstating the constraint: a procedure was defined by the manufacturer (in this case SpaceX) and they committed to the customer that they would use that procedure.
Second: in my case it was pharmaceutical manufacture and we were giving these drugs to patients for an approval study. We had defined a reproducible procedure that gave reproducible results. Deciding the change the procedure would require proving that the result of the change was the same as before said change. As a person who takes medication I am glad for GMP (the equivalent of ISO9000 in pharma manufacture).
In the case of an expensive rocket that launches something likely unrepairable after launch (and perhaps irreplaceable) I want to know that the mfr has figured out as many of the risk factors as possible and how to mitigate them.
Perhaps significantly, management positions aren't represented by the state workers' union, which is the only thing (barely) insulating the lower level workers from that insanity.
I prefer to swap words around in cases like this to make it unambiguous, for example, “soda bottles and poop...”
Of course there is going to be dirt, rocks and yes, even fecal matter. What are they supposed to do, blow their hot exaust gases into a climate-controlled cleanroom?