Re: NASA's most overused word: anomaly !

From JTM:
On Feb 22, 3:38am, tdadamemd-spamblo...@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
To put it more succinctly...

O-rings are the 51L scapegoat.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

"a goat upon whose head are symbolically placed the sins of the
people"

The symbolism is there, but the PEOPLE were not guilty! Rather, some
of its leaders and its prime launch-contractor management were, and
they have gone unpunished. Bill Rogers (admittedly representing
Lockheed) tried to make us all guilty in his Rose Garden speech, even
poor innocent Christa and her parents:

"This tragic accident was the result of the failure of that joint on
the right-hand booster rocket. ... In a sense, this is a kind of
national tragedy that a lot of us are to blame for. I mean, I think
that in a sense the administration, the Congress, the press, if you'll
excuse the expression, all of us were too optimistic, too willing to
accept the fact that this was operational, and I think we've all
learned a lesson."

Well, I CANNOT "excuse the expression." Ronald Reagan, and he alone,
declared the shuttle operational after only four flights. Ronald
Reagan's men, abetted by Lockheed, made sure we all "learned a
lesson," not a lesson we wanted to learn or deserved to learn, but one
that they wanted us to PAY for.

Whether a vehicle is experimental or operational...
When someone tries to get it to do something it was never designed to
do, well outside of any condition it was ever tested at, and if it
fails, I do not see it as the vehicle's fault. I see it as their
fault.

I do not mean to fault you personally, John, for anything you did or
didn't do. You yourself are in the best position to make that
judgement. And when I do go to the length of singling certain
individuals out (like the Launch Director, etc) I do so because I see
a severe lack of proper accountability for mistakes that were made.

We all make mistakes. Some of those have more dire consequences than
other. But it is not possible to live a perfect mistake-free life.
As the saying goes:

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad
judgement.

I do not have any goal of headhunting, guilt trips, or punishment for
anyone. My motivation for highlighting what I see to be
accountability that has yet to be properly taken is so that grave
errors of this type can be better avoided in the future.


~ CT
.

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