I don't understand how this incident, involving a Russian spacecraft, necessarily indicates that NASA now has a poor safety culture again. The argument seems to be missing a step.
> To calm things down, official NASA spokesmen provided very preliminary underestimates in how big and how fast the station's spin had been. These were presented without any caveat that the numbers were unverified—and the real figures turned out to be much worse. The Russian side, for its part, dismissed the attitude deviation as a routine bump in a normal process of automatic docking and proclaimed there would be no formal incident investigation, especially any that would involve their American partners. Indeed, both sides seemed to agree that the sooner the incident was forgotten, the better.
The author, who worked in Mission Control operations in the 1980s, argues that similar signs of degrading safety standards and minimizing mistakes led up to the Challenger tragedy.
I'm not saying they *have* learned any lesson or that there isn't incompetence/laziness somewhere. I'm just saying that trying to keep the incident low-key is not itself an indication of that.
As someone who has worked in IT operations, there are plenty of times where I have seen a near-outage occur because of a bad process. And many times, the offending team would quietly get their shit together but also not publicize their mistake, so as not to incur the wrath of execs.
The way the article is written you'd think this was NASA's station. How dare NASA let this happen!
It doesn't belong to the US, it isn't NASA's station, it is the International Space Station. The module that tried to take its football and go home was Russian.
When your left arm decides to "go home" and your right arm doesn't, it's a problem for your right arm too.
It’s much more efficient just having a sane procedure to check which gear you are engaging.
In practice you need both systems. You can’t just run up flywheels indefinitely, every now and then you need to use thrusters so you can spin them down. Meanwhile flywheels give you fine control that’s difficult to achieve with thrusters, especially on something as big and complex as the station.