Nedelin Catastrophe: The Worst Space-Related Disaster | Hacker News Reader

Nedelin Catastrophe: The Worst Space-Related Disaster

amusingplanet.com

42 pointsHooke8 comments

Flagging as "use original source" because large paragraphs are copy-and-pasted from here:

https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/saf... (pdf)

(e.g. the text starting at "The trouble with early Soviet missiles...").

I'm going to argue otherwise.

The story here cites and synthesizes multiple sources, it does not consist of a simple copy/paste or paraphrase of the NASA source, it's historical rather than current (where pointing to original sources matters more), and the format is HTML rather than PDF, which greatly reduces already substantial frictions for HN members to actually R. the F.A.

The NASA study is properly cited as one of the references at the bottom of the article.

- "it does not consist of a simple copy/paste or paraphrase of the NASA source,"

It is exactly that and it copies it (and the other sources) extensively. It only makes very superficial word changes—enough to throw off exact string matches; not nearly enough to create a passable pretense of "I wrote this".

- "The NASA study is properly cited as one of the references at the bottom of the article."

It's not properly cited because the text they're lifting isn't in quote marks or a quotation block or anything like that–isn't in any syntactic way attributed to the person who wrote it. There's nothing saying "I didn't write this part; I'm quoting this from someone else's work". (It's not sufficient disclosure to just include a link to the lifted text in "references". Most people won't look at the cited references, let alone read all of them in their entirety—as would be required to figure out what text's being lifted from where. It's the author's burden to disclose all that).

I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. This is straight plagiarism: it's in my view a pretty typical and low-effort example of it.

- "and the format is HTML rather than PDF, which greatly reduces already substantial frictions for HN members"

The problem isn't that they're re-publishing parts of someone else's text, but that they're pretending that they wrote it.

This terrible event, and the worst two US ones, Challenger and Columbia, were preventable, organizational management failures. When there's a big project with big money, there will be big pressure to skip steps and degrade sensible caution.

This is very often the case in large accidents, which tend to be associated with large organisations (private corporations, governments, occasionally NGOs, or a often a combination of two or more of same). The late Charles Perrow's work is highly illuminating in this regard: Normal Accidents (1984), Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (1972), The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (2011), The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation (1990), Organizing America: Wealth, Power and the Origins of American Capitalism (2002), among others.

I've drawn similar associations with dam failures, notably at Banqio (China, 1975: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927596> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36562100>. More recently at Derna: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523055>. That last also mentions failures or near-failures in the US, virtually all of which have an organisational dysfunction element.

I wouldn't put them in the same bucket though exactly. Yes in the broad sense Challenger and Columbia were "organizational management failures", but the basic organizational failures was the whole federal process leading to the Space Shuttle in the first place. It was simply a fundamentally bad design made far worse due to political forces, and not because it was doing something cutting edge and nobody knew better. It was made to work through heroics, but the human condition being what it is, building a system that depends on continuous perfection is a bad idea. Why were the SRBs in sections that needed all O-rings in the first place? Because they were made in freaking Utah and then had to be transported thousands of miles. Other rockets will never have Challenger's failure mode at all regardless of organizational problems.

Or even more fundamentally, the Space Shuttle was unique(ly bad) in having the important payload section on the side of the rocket, instead on top like everything else from Mercury to Apollo to Falcon 9. That harmed both escape modes and debris. When the payload/passenger bits are on top, escape, no matter what stage of launch/flight you're at, effectively boils down to: go faster. Which is aided by an emergency needing escape tending to result in all the boom-y bits below you propelling you in the direction you want (forward, faster) while simultaneously slowing down the rest. And any ice or foam or whatever else that falls off will be falling down, away from the top. Any boom has lots more stuff between compartment at the top and it.

So F9 or even Starship are just never going to face the Challenger or Columbia failure modes in the first place no matter. The entire class of issues has been simply negated at the engineering level. If they do face problems, they will have full envelope escape options that the Space Shuttle simply never could. When it comes to reliability, the default best part is no part. Organization should be on top of sound engineering foundations.

For the Nedelin situation, while yes politics screwed that up too, they were at least doing something fundamentally hard and new. It's easy to say that there were better engineering solutions there as well, and indeed moves were made by all sides towards solid fueled ICBMs. But it's not like they consciously chose a junk given better options, liquid was the best for speed at that point and hypergolics in turn for military usage. The Space Shuttle was always a series of tragedies waiting to happen and so utterly unnecessary.

Ignoring all the weird design decisions, STS was flexible enough to do a bunch of things we still don't have a replacement for, such as on-orbit service missions, satellite return (if we wanted, never used as far as the public knows), ISS reboost (dragon can't, cygnus can), etc.

Anyway the failures I was pointing out were very tactical, classical get-there-itis ones. Challenger had a clear warning not to launch on that cold day but was overridden. For Columbia, Boeing engineers modeled potential damage from the foam strike, but mission managers dismissed the risk and decided not to inspect and mitigate; there were several options on the table that might have improved survival if they had done so.

The domain name and the story seem a bit incongruous...

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