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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

wasn't it management meddling? process called for redesigning the challenger oring, as corrosion was triple than expected, and process called for inspecting the columbia tiles. you can find all of these details in the reports, and you can find the name of the managers overriding engineering processes in both instances.

challanger: http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/12722.aspx http://www.engineering.com/Library/ArticlesPage/tabid/85/Art...

columbia: http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=9fe7f...

(notice that engineering requested hard photographic data to assess the damage, and her used gut feeling)

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Those were _great_ links. "A Management Decision Overrides a Recommendation Not to Launch" was just infuriating, especially when all of the presented options lead to "there's basically nothing you can do". I can't even begin to imagine what the engineers felt when Challenger exploded. It's bad enough when there's some accident, but it's a whole new level of tragedy when the accident's preventable... if only people would listen to their advisers.

> challenger

Well, as mgmt said, there was no evidence the O-rings were unsafe outside their operating limitations - because they'd never been tested at those temperatures before. I know, it's Twilight Zone material, but they found a hole in the launch rules (process) and ran with it. Previous O-ring failures had been within specs, so as far as they were concerned, it wasn't a temp issue, it was a known design flaw to be lived with.

> columbia

As for that article, pictures really didn't matter at that point so it wasn't "one decision." Rescue would have been a foolhardy venture more likely to kill both crews.

Columbia wasn't about mgmt, it was about engineering folks being placated by decades of success and making wrong assumptions about debris. There wasn't any workable solution anyway, it was a design flaw of the launch stack. The only solution was to never fly, and engineers weren't lined up to kill their own program.

The only reason the previous O-ring failures were within specs is because they changed the specs so that they could launch despite the previous failures.

Exactly but I don't think he read the links. Engineering designed system with triple tolerance. o rings had triple the corrosion, but management said it's still within tolerane, right? Triple corrosion but we have triple tolerance, so we're even right?

Engineering knew pretty well that wasn't the case, and that is not how tolerance works.

Feynman in his reports goes a long way to list all the overrides management did and how much the whole shuttle program was built on wishful thinking.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

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