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Comment by beltex | Hacker News Reader

“Now before every flight I always send out an email company-wide saying, ‘If anyone can think of any possible reason to hold off on launching, they should call me immediately on my cell phone or send me an email, whether their manager agrees with it or not.’ But thats sort of something I’ve always sent before every flight, but the 20th time I send that email it just seems like… you know, ’There’s Elon being paranoid again’, so maybe it doesn’t resonate with the same force. But I think now everyone at the company appreciates just how difficult it is to get rockets to orbit successfully and I think we’ll be stronger for it.”

Elon at 36:15

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2015/07/spacex-releases.html

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I wonder if such a thing actually ever happened?

At SpaceX? Not that I'm aware of

At Nasa, people raising red flags before the launch of a manned vehicle? STS-51-L, Challenger, January 1986

"What really happened was typical I think in large bureaucratic organizations, and any big organization where you’re frankly trying to be a hero in doing your job. And NASA had two strikes against it from the start, which one of those is they were too successful. They had gotten by for a quarter of a century now and had never lost a single person going into space, which was considered a very hazardous thing to do. And they had rescued the Apollo 13 halfway to the moon when part of the vehicle blew up. Seemed like it was an impossible task, but they did it. … So it gives you a little bit of arrogance you shouldn’t have. And a huge amount of money [was] involved. But they hadn’t stumbled yet and they just pressed on. So you really had to quote “prove that it would fail” and nobody could do that." -McDonald

I just listened to a Freakanomics podcast about the person who raised a red flag and wanted to cancel the launch. Very interesting listen. Episode was "Failure Is Your Friend".

http://freakonomics.com/2014/06/05/failure-is-your-friend-a-...

> ‘If anyone can think of any possible reason to hold off on launching, they should call me immediately on my cell phone or send me an email, whether their manager agrees with it or not.’

Two thoughts: if you need to send a message like that, the culture of your organization needs some work. Also, does he really think a person can send a message like that - when their manager does not agree - without torpedoing their career?

It's only a problem if you're wrong. If you're right, you become the manager.

> It's only a problem if you're wrong.

Actually it's only a problem if you're REALLY wrong. If you're just a little bit wrong, or your manager was only just barely right, it's likely that your manager will be reprimanded instead of you.

Further I think half the point of the exercise is to help ensure that managers don't dismiss people's concerns. If you want everyone to take launch safety really seriously broadcasting to everyone that you can go above as many boss' heads as necessary to get something addressed should help keep everyone on their toes.

That's probably a direct reaction to some of the NASA issues that have happened in the past. (Most famously the Challenger disaster)

Yeah. It is also the sort of thing NASA actually has in place - "anyone can escalate a safety issue!"

It is worth studying how that kind of thing has NOT fixed the issues as NASA, and how it did not prevent us from losing Columbia. You either have a culture that puts safety, engineering and problem solving ahead of politics and expediency in all cases, or you don't. There are absolutely not any shortcuts to that.

I don't think it's intended as a short cut, just as one component of the right culture.

Sending a message like that is part of the work to ensure the culture of your organization allows it. Otherwise managers at all kinds of levels will bring with them their own ideas of whether or not this is acceptable, and act accordingly.

Besides, this is unusual for a company the size of SpaceX. In most companies of some size I've worked at, most people may have the CEO's e-mail. Maybe. But usually the one filtered by a PA. But most of them don't have the CEO's cellphone number.

> Also, does he really think a person can send a message like that - when their manager does not agree - without torpedoing their career?

If this is usually the case, does that not mean that all organizations needs to work on their culture? So what is the issue with sending am message like that again?

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