It's funny now - imagine being the Commissar for Lens Cap design in the old USSR and overseeing all that
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns"
Typical bureaucratic BS. Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuYDkVRyMkg
The whole videos series of JPL and the Space Age is very enjoyable to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...
Did they ever figure out who was sleeping with whom/who was related to whom?
Is there some obvious reason to blame that specific contractor?
But I didn't see anything in that description that was against serving the public. The only way to serve the public at that point in time was launching an investigation, not making super preliminary statements about what could have gone wrong and who could have been hurt.
I wouldn't say the tone deafness itself is a significant sign of corruption.
‘Don’t blame the contractor?’ Concern.
I think he said both of the things you listed. How do we interpret saying both?
The thing he didn't do was separate, saying much about how dangerous it was.
If you answer that question considering that corruption may indeed be involved, the answer is quite obvious no?
Well that's not true. Incorrectly blaming a particular company in the heat of the moment could lead to harm or harassment, and it's good to remind people to wait for a real investigation. The last thing the DOT wants at that point is even more avoidable mistakes.
And if it was motivated by corruption that statement seems like a bad idea. It draws a lot of attention to that specific contractor while telling people to wait for the investigation. If they are at fault, that extra attention is bad for them in the long run.
There is zero legitimate reason for the DOT to try to protect the contractor in this situation.
It easily could have been a different contractor, or even not a contractor.
You can't do anything about the past, but you can do something about the future.
The DOT head should be looking at both things. But at that point in time there's nothing they can meaningfully say about what happened except by making a serious promise to investigate. On the other end, the harm from incorrectly blaming the wrong people is something they can try to prevent.
It probably was tone-deaf but when you say their underlying concerns are wrong I disagree.
Either could inspire someone to pursue a career in science, I was more thinking of just practical benefits.
So, yes, a good teacher could inspire 10+ others to make spacecraft, tech startups, etc. Maybe the ROI for humanity is greater if that teacher stayed as an IC in their field.
I've just read the Wiki on the Mars Climate Orbiter and it explains the disastrous implications of that mistake. What's tragic about such errors is that the US keeps repeating them, Hubble was another very expensive Imperial/Metric fuck-up even though it was recoverable.
I've often had debates with Americans about Imperial versus Metric when I was in the US and their retort is usually along the lines "why should we give up God's own units for that nasty French stuff?" or words to that effect.
They gave other specious arguments too, such as cost of new tooling would be prohibitive. That's rubbish† of course (certainly in the grand schema of things as the long-term benefits far outweigh initial costs).
Well, anyway, by the looks of it God is on the side of the French!
What many of us outside the US find odd and can't figure out is that in its early days the American Republic was hand-in-glove with the French against that horrible Imperial island, so why did it reject the French system?
Yes, I know of the early attempt at metricization and the loss of weights and measures at sea whilst in transit from France to the US but given its impact that's pretty paltry excuse.
It really is time you guys caught up with the rest of the world. Surely, it's getting a bit too expensive to continue to lose spacecraft to whims of measurement.
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† Check how well Australia's metric conversion went some 50 years ago. It's a textbook example of how to go about it correctly. I know, I live there—we fuck things up more often than not but this one we got AOK right. If you ask kids at school today what various Imperial units are they'd likely say they've never heard of them.
If someone is an adult, it's a bunch of new information to learn, and unless they work in a field that involves measurements and math, it probably won't be an obvious net positive for them.
The biggest benefit IMO is for future generations, who wouldn't grow up having to memorize conversion factors for a bunch of ancient legacy units (feet per mile, teaspoons per cup, etc.) as well as having to do the conversions when working with people from outside the US.
I'd greatly appreciate it as someone who does a lot of hobby work in various fields, because metric measurements are something I can use across all of them. But the impression I've gotten is that professionals in a single field are so used to working with whichever specific imperial units are relevant to them that it would be a wash. And since they'd have to redevelop all of that intuitive knowledge for the metric equivalent, they see it as a net negative.
"If someone is an adult, it's a bunch of new information to learn, and unless they work in a field that involves measurements and math, it probably won't be an obvious net positive for them."
Absolutely true! So what does a country do to overcome the problems of familiarity and habit? First thing is not to scare the population and the best way to do that is with a friendly and sophisticated advertising campaign.
Before I go further I must point out that Australia, the UK and New Zealand had a much more difficult task than the US if or when it converts to Metric. Reason: our currency followed the LSD system—Pounds, Shillings and Pence—so we had the double-sized problem of converting both the currency and weights and measures. Right, the US has had decimal currency almost from its beginning. You've already a head start! :-)
Pre decimal currency people in Australia, the UK and NZ had a mad system inherited from history where 12 pence = 1 shilling, 20 shilling = 1 pound (£). And there was an even madder unit called the guinea (gn) which is 21 shillings—that's 1 shilling more than the pound or 252 pence/pennies (that's madness but there are good historical reasons for it that go back centuries).
It used to be commonplace to see ads, store sales etc. like 14gn & 3/- (shillings)—that's 297 shillings or 3,528 pennies (if I haven't screwed the math up).
And that was only part of it, there's a florin, a crown, half crown etc and a halfpenny. Everyone had to know all this stuff (if you didn't you'd likely be robbed). A couple of examples in your parlance:
penny (1d) — 1¢, penny
sixpence (6d) — 5¢, nickel
shilling (12d) — 10¢, dime
10 shillings (10/-) — $1, dollar
Every country that converted from LSD to decimal adopted the preferred 1-2-5 number series to minimize the number of coins, i..e.: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20,…. Same with the Euro. The US has somewhat screwed its coinage up with its beloved Quarter. When those of us who come from 1-2-5 series countries go to the US one of the first things we notice is how much loose change we accumulate in our pockets. The difference is amazing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_number#1-2-5_series;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_problem
It's worth noting that Australia's main currency unit is the dollar (same basic structure as the US dollar) which is half the old pound. That was too much for the UK, tradition held them back, the old 20 shilling pound became the new 10 shilling pound sans name change. That meant a coarser granularity, the smallest unit (the new pence) is over twice that of the old. Of course, that led to price hikes. The UK then went on screw up its weights and measures conversion for the same reason. I'll discuss why in a moment.
As mentioned, everything counts on getting the population on side, here's one of Australia's decimal currency ads (even now it's pretty good):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm_Vtl2u1Hc †
A similar campaign was waged a little later with the weights and measures conversion. This is where Australia shined and it suggests your worry about conversion being a tough sell—which is true—has to be accepted and tackled head on. And that's how it was done here.
What Australia's Metric Conversion Board did was to cold-turkey the whole country from the outset just as happened with decimal currency—old coins and notes disappeared almost overnight, as soon as 'old' cash was banked new coins and notes were issued.
Almost immediately, grocery items changed from pounds and ounces to kilograms/grams, pints/fluid ounces to litres, feet and inches to metres/cms. Suddenly, kids going back to school after holidays could only buy 30cm rules sans inches—both sides were only metric.
What's more the government made it unlawful to sell new goods with Imperial measurements on them. Right, supermarket goods didn't have both pounds/ounces and kilograms—only kilograms (of course manufacturers had time to tool up).
What happened? Well, a lot of whingeing for a few weeks and it was essentially all over. People adapted remarkably quickly. Teachers got rid of all those Imperial tables, and so on. Lumber changed, a 4x2" (OK, 2x4" in your lingo) became 100x50mm, and so on.
Oh, and I must say I lived though all that, I was a teenager when decimal currency came in. Even I bitched about not being able to buy a rule with both inches and centimeters on it. In fact, I had a friend who worked for the Metric Conversion Board and I used to whinge to him about it. It also worked both ways, I always had the latest lowdown on how the conversion was proceeding.
What happened after that? The country adjusted remarkably well and it now thinks metric by default (and that's absolutely the key point). Both the US and the UK are largely metric in areas but neither think in metric by default. It's not a cultural meme in either.
After everybody in Australia had become fully metrified the government reversed the ban on things marked with Imperial measurements (you'd never see groceries marked in Imperial units but you would see dual units on a 30cm rule nowadays. It was a great success with little pain.
Now look how the UK stuffed it up—or what not to do! The UK started its metrication program in 1965 which is earlier than Australia yet it's still a mess. Officially it's a metric country and yet a huge amount of Imperial activity is still taking place. I recall around the time of Brexit some of Boris Johnson's cohorts were even calling for the reintroduction of Imperial units. Moreover, you see the Imperial mindset everywhere even in the BBC, for example, doctors on medical programs frequently discuss patients weigh in stones—for heaven's sake very few people in Australia would know what a 'stone' is let alone that it's 14lb.
What the British did was do precious little, they didn't ban goods marked with Imperial measurements and so on, 60 years later it's still largely an Imperial country.
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Edit, Ha, I've not seen that clip for many years but looking at it now I realize that it was produced by Artransa Park TV which was a subsidiary of the television network I worked for. I'd probably would never have made that connection if it were not for this post. Small world eh?
I don’t agree with how you seem to be treating currency decimalisation as part of metrication, when to me it is a completely separate topic: the metric system is a system of units for measuring physical quantities; currencies and units of account are not physical quantities, and as such do not form any part of the metric system.
Also, some other countries who had weird-sized currency subdivisions got rid of them in a very different way: hyperinflation can quickly render currency subdivisions practically irrelevant-if a loaf of bread is a thousand pounds, nobody cares about shillings or pence any more. Of course, if you have the choice, an ordinary currency switchover is much better than hyperinflation.
All I can add is that I lived through both conversions and witnessed them from day-to-day.
They were planned by greater minds than mine to follow one another with the metric building on the momentum of the first. Outcomes are what ultimately matter, both conversions along with those in NZ have been recognized as some of the most successful of all time.
Decimalisation is different to metrication but they were not perceived that way, instead they were a political matter and that required a political solution involving Parliament, and that's an altogether different matter.
BTW, well before the French Revolution when the Franc was set in stone the French currency followed the same divisions as the UK pound, the livre was divided into 20 then 12. Similarly length, the French inch if I recall is marginally longer than the Imperial one. Again, it's politics at work here, both currency and measures are often closely aligned.
> Great teacher, but to have your life's work go up in smoke like that is brutal.
No doubt. I hope everyone's doing alright.
I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
He executed and imprisoned a bunch of his best aircraft designers. Look what he did to Andrei Tupolev and his design bureau; they designed a whole aircraft in the Gulag: https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gula...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion)
The Soviets wanted to increase agricultural yield, but the policies Stalin implemented caused the harvest in 1932 to fall by about 20%. In a country already just barely able to feed itself, that led to famine, not just in Ukraine but across the USSR.
E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.
It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.
Would you blame them? Who cares is something good happens now in Russia while they are brutally murdering their neighbors?
Nobody cares whether Hitler was great at drawing or not.
https://theconversation.com/why-vladimir-putin-still-has-wid...
This isn't just oppressed society afraid to act. This is actual support for the actual killer of the babies. Despicable.
Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans, pervasive disinformation efforts, and aim to destroy the peace and integrity of the countries it perceives as a competition.
For now I'll just agree this is largely deserved, and I'll play the sad tune on the tiny violin.
> Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans,
USA started with a genocide of a whole continent. Started more wars than any other nation/state in the human history. Probably killed more civilians than any other nation in history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, just to name a few countries with huge losses among civilians, not even counting those who died from hunger or illnesses caused by US wars and deliberate destruction of agriculture and infrastructure).
So what? Do you read every day that it is the most belligerent and aggressive state on Earth, although it really is?
> pervasive disinformation efforts
I've already wrote in the original message, how Russia is portrayed by the media and Hollywoold. Is it a really true information? Not propaganda and disinformation?
The USA is the #1 supporter of baby killing in the world right now, by a huge margin. Everyone outside the USA’s imperial propaganda bubble can see it - Americans cannot.
Are all Americans bad guys because of what they are allowing to happen with their countries resources?
Basically nobody in the west has any idea, and people always assume I was in a hell hole the entire time. It’s wild what propaganda will do for knowledge of a place.
The rest of the world having to clean up the mess left by the Soviet Union (paying for the cleanup and decommissioning of nuclear submarines, Chernobyl, rebuilding eastern Europe) may have a lot to do with the anti-Soviet attitude.
Have you ever wondered if maybe that (and by extension your attitude to it) is part of the problem?
Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
Right, it's time we stopped this stereotyping and looked at this objectively. The Russian Empire and later the USSR has had many, many truly brilliant people over recent centuries. The list of names seems endless, here are few immediately to mind: Chebyshev, Cantor, Markov, Borodin, Köppen, Landau, Cherenkov, Mendeleyev, Tolstoy, Shostakovich, Gagarin, Prokudin-Gorsky, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. And here's just the Wiki list of Russian scientists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_scientists. Now, there's much more, do the same again for physicists, mathematicians, chemists, composers, writers, novelist and so on. When one looks at the sheer numbers of people it's hard to believe that they all come from Russia.
Morever, it's hard to imagine where the world would be today without these brilliant people. It's almost inconceivable the world would be anywhere near the same without them.
I'd like to think most of us are smart enough to separate the majority of Russians from the small minority of ratbags, sociopaths and psychopathic, paranoid, sadistic monsters such as Stalin, Putin and Ivan the Terrible. There is no doubt that Russia has had a long and terrible history of tyrant rulers whose reign of tyranny has caused great harm to the Russian people. If anything we ought to feel some sympathy and compassion for the Russian population as a whole given the centuries-long turmoil Russia has endured.
Nevertheless, in spite of its long history of adversity Russia has still been able to produce this brilliant body of people and it's done so essentially consistently over recent centuries.
Give credit where credit is due.
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment
It was worse than that. He was beaten with rubber hose and wire harnesses, had needles pressed in the body, was urinated on. He then was sent to a gulag where he was left dying from hunger and scurvy. He was saved by a fellow imprisoned engineer who was fortunate to fight his way up though the inmate hierarchy.
The broken jaw, out of the many broken bones in his body is mostly mentioned because it was ultimately the cause of his death in 1960s.