Re: Discovery will fly against the advice of its engineering and safety chiefs


"John Savard" <jsavard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4497f1fa.1245797@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:11:51 -0500, "Paul F. Dietz" <dietz@xxxxxxx>
wrote, in part:

Astronaut lives are not infinitely valuable.

All innocent human lives are infinitely valuable.

Sorry, but that's absolutely incorrect. Value is placed on people's lives
all the time. When a car or van load of NASA employees crashes and the
employees are killed, the space program does not come to a complete stop for
a few years to address traffic safety issues. Why then is the shuttle
different?

Also, insurance companies and the court system places dollar values on
people's lives all the time. It's a routine thing to do. Large
construction projects can estimate how many people will die during the
project and insurance can be bought to cover those expected losses
(including the expected lawsuits and out of court settlements).

We are not yet able,
for any amount of money, to resurrect someone from the dead after he or
she has died.

Due to cost and political realities, there won't be any more space shuttles
built either, but that does not mean that they are infinitely valuable.

Unfortunately, right now we live in an emergency situation of limited
resources, where money fails to be spent where it could be used to save
lives, because we don't have enough of it.

This will always be the case. Resources will always be limited.

In any case, when I speak of "cutting corners", I don't mean failure to
take extravagantly expensive safety precautions; I mean clear and
blatant negligence.

Why is it that blatant negligence seems so clear to people after the
incident occurs?

In the case of the Apollo 1 fire, one hardly needed to be a rocket
scientist to know that pure oxygen at 1 atmosphere creates a fire
hazard, and hatches that open inwards, while they make sense as a safety
feature in the vacuum of space, mean that greater attention must be
paid.

Which is why every attempt was made prior to Apollo 1 to eliminate all
ignition sources within the pressurized volume of the cabin. In hindsight,
that wasn't a very good approach at solving the problem.

In the case of the Challenger disaster, a competent engineer saw the
risk was clearly unacceptable, and was pressured into not taking the
warning to the right people, because it would be an embarassment to the
company. Had the other members of the Morton Thiokol board been
convicted of criminal negligence causing death (involuntary homicide),
that would have sent a clear message that carelessness with other
people's lives is not tolerated.

This is a bit of an oversimplification. The engineers were placed in a
position where they had to prove it was unsafe to fly. At the time, they
could not prove that the risk was "clearly unacceptable", so they were
overruled by management.

This time is a bit different. If damage to the wing is detected, the crew
can wait for a rescue aboard ISS. In other words, NASA management seems to
think they are currently running a small risk of losing another shuttle, but
not the crew.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)


.

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