Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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Things could have been done differently with the space shuttle.

Note that the crew of the Challenger wasn't killed by the "explosion", they were killed when the vehicle compartment they were in hit the water.

If the shuttle had an escape mechanism the way every other manned space vehicle had, they might have survived. Had they built in an escape mechanism, there wouldn't have been any room for cargo. From a safety perspective launching cargo + passengers on the same rocket was a mistake.

Also the shuttle was designed to do a military mission that it never actually did, which would be launching, orbiting the Earth once, and then landing at an airstrip close to the launch point. That requires a large "cross-range" (ability to turn when reentering the atmosphere) which in turn requires larger wings which are more vulnerable to something like what happened to Colombia.

One of the reasons I really like Challenger Launch Decision is because it does a very good job of avoiding the hindsight bias as much as possible, by getting the readers to understand the perspective and the cultural norm of the organizations and participants, and tracing the decision making process itself and influences on those, instead of technical decisions themselves that were / might have been wrong in hindsight.

In hindsight, we can see mistakes in terms of specific design and technical decisions. But I don't think those are the biggest lessons from the disaster. We will continue making such mistakes, since technical misjudgement itself will always happen. I think Challenger Launch Decision's main point, that the organizational structure and culture have large impact on individual decision making is the lasting lesson. The book's closing sentence is excellent:

"The lingering uncertainty in the social control of risky technology is how to control the institutional forces that generate competition and scarcity and the powerful leaders who, in response, establish goals and allocate resources, using and abusing high-risk technical systems".

> "The lingering uncertainty in the social control of risky technology is how to control the institutional forces that generate competition and scarcity and the powerful leaders who, in response, establish goals and allocate resources, using and abusing high-risk technical systems".

Seems to me that the relationship between Boeing and its various 737 MAX customers could be seen in a very similar light. Abusing high-risk technical systems as a tool to extract resources to cover for artificial scarcity in budgets or market expectations.

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