Even in the case of the Challenger, no single article say WHO was the executive that finally approved the launch. No body was jailed for gross negligence. Even Ricahrd Feynman felt that the investigative comission was biased from the start.
So, since there is no "price to pay" to make this bad calls they are continuously made.
> Even in the case of the
> Challenger, no single article
> say WHO was the executive
> that finally approved the launch.
See page 94 of the Rogers commission report[1]: "a final management review was conducted by Mason, Lund, Kilminster, and Wiggins".
Page 108 has their full names as part of a timeline of events at NASA and Morton Thiokol.
1. https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_comm...
Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions, and when you do, you may find they're not the right people for the job.
Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.
It will also mean that people will desperately cover up mistakes rather than being open about it, meaning the mistakes do not get corrected. We see this in play where manufacturers won't fix problems because fixing a problem is an admission of liability for the consequences of those problems, and punishment.
Even the best, most conscientious people make mistakes. Jailing them is not going to be helpful, it will just make things worse.
Why do you think you want it? You don't want it.
That’s what responsibility is: taking lumps for making mistakes.
If I make a mistake on the road and end up killing someone, I can absolutely be held liable for manslaughter.
I don’t know if jail time is the right answer, but there absolutely needs to be some accountability.
During WW2, a B-19 crash landed in the Soviet Union. The B-29's technology was light-years ahead of Soviet engineering. Stalin demanded that an exact replica of the B-29 be built. And that's what the engineers did. They were so terrified of Stalin that they carefully duplicated the battle damage on the original.
Be careful what you wish for when advocating criminal punishment.
That said, even then Tu-4 wasn't a carbon copy. Because US used imperial units for everything, Soviets simply couldn't make it a carbon copy because they could not e.g. source plating and wire of the exact right size. So they replaced it with the nearest metric equivalents that were available, erring on the side of making things thicker, to ensure structural integrity - which also made it a little bit heavier than the original. Even bigger changes were made - for example, Tupolev insisted on using existing Soviet engines (!), weapons, and radios in lieu of copying the American ones. It should be noted that Stalin really did want a carbon copy originally, and Tupolev had to fight his way on each one of those decisions.
Same as the insulation damage to the tiles kept being ignored until Columbia barely survived. And then they fixed the part they blamed for that incident, but the tiles kept coming back damaged.
And look at what else was going wrong that day--the boosters would most likely have been lost at sea if the launch had worked.
They had every engineer involved with the booster saying launching in the cold was a bad idea, yet they started by trying to look at all the ways it could have gone wrong rather than even looking into what the engineers were screaming about.
We also have them claiming a calibration error with the pyrometer (the ancestor of the modern thermometer you point at something) even though that made other numbers not make sense.
There was a recent Netflix documentary where they interviewed him. He was the NASA manager that made the final call.
On video, he flatly stated that he would make the same decision again and had no regrets: https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/netflix-challenger-final-flig...
I had never seen anyone who is more obviously a psychopath than this guy.
You know that theory that people like that gravitate towards management positions? Yeah... it's this guy. Literally him. Happy to send people into the meat grinder for "progress", even though no actually scientific progress of any import was planned for the Challenger mission. It was mostly a publicity stunt!