4 ms·

The Space Shuttle disaster was a symptom of the US political process.

ltbarcly3 7y ago
No, it wasn't a 'symptom' of anything. The Space Shuttle was a remarkable engineering achievement, made at enormous cost, built and managed by great people who had only the best intentions. Yet it still failed in a spectacular way, because the engineering wasn't perfect and the management wasn't perfect. In the end Challenger was destroyed by the failure of a cheap gasket, and the gasket failed because the decisions made and processes which produced the environment in which those decisions were made around making a go/no-go call was imperfect and failed. It doesn't matter what political process is in place, it doesn't matter how good the people are, or how good the engineering is, or anything else for that matter, spectacular failures are inevitable. When one happens, we have to learn from it and figure out how to build organizations and engineering artifacts that are better in practical and achievable ways, not try to use it as some kind of evidence that our pet political theory would have somehow let people make perfect decisions or make rubber gaskets invulnerable to cold weather. It turns out that if you take some task that is incredibly hard and inherently complex and performed by a very large number of extremely qualified and smart people near the limits of human experience, and you want to do that task in a better way it isn't going to boil down to something simple or obvious. In fact, if the US political process is so broken, why is it the only process that ends up with space shuttles sitting in hangers? It's certainly not perfect, but since nobody can point to a political process that results in better space shuttles I don't see any evidence that humans have so far developed a better political process if you are measuring it in units of 'space shuttle reliability'.
- dralley 7y ago
  If you are not aware, I recommend you look up the design process for the space shuttle. It is a perfect example of engineering taking a backseat to politics. TL;DR version: The original design of the space shuttle was vastly smaller and simpler, but during the cold war the only way you could get something funded was to have a military dual use. So the Department of Defense offered NASA funding so long as they redesign the entire space shuttle to be able to capture and return Soviet satellites to the US -- a task that it never performed -- which required the design to be massively compromised.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Would you consider the Soviet Burans in Kazakhstan ‘sitting in hangers’? The design of those shuttles lacked the flaw that contributed to the Challenger tragedy. So, what was the engineering reason for implementing a US design requiring o-rings?
  - tatersolid 7y ago
    Umm... you do know the Buran only launched once with no humans aboard before being scrapped? I’m pretty sure there were plenty of flaws that would have shown up if Buran had flown 100+ real orbital missions.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      The launcher it was to use was hilariously dangerous. (Saturn V is but in a different way.) The thing would be killed before it even a achieved space. At least they managed to salvage the excellent engines out of the project.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      The Russians had the good sense not to sacrifice a dozen human lives on the altar of their space shuttle program. As a direct consequence of that decision, they also still have the ability to launch manned spacecraft, unlike the United States.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Communism—which is otherwise an intolerably terrible system—led to manned space stations and safer, more reliable manned launch vehicles (namely Soyuz and Shenzhou). It’s a national embarrassment that the US sacrificed billions of dollars and a dozen human lives on the shuttle boondoggle and ended up with no human launch capacity for over a decade and counting. Doing things that are “incredibly hard and inherently complex” and also unnecessary and dangerous is idiotic. Things like building and flying a space shuttle rather than a normal space capsule. Especially when human lives are at stake.

No, it wasn't a 'symptom' of anything. The Space Shuttle was a remarkable engineering achievement, made at enormous cost, built and managed by great people who had only the best intentions. Yet it still failed in a spectacular way, because the engineering wasn't perfect and the management wasn't perfect. In the end Challenger was destroyed by the failure of a cheap gasket, and the gasket failed because the decisions made and processes which produced the environment in which those decisions were made around making a go/no-go call was imperfect and failed. It doesn't matter what political process is in place, it doesn't matter how good the people are, or how good the engineering is, or anything else for that matter, spectacular failures are inevitable. When one happens, we have to learn from it and figure out how to build organizations and engineering artifacts that are better in practical and achievable ways, not try to use it as some kind of evidence that our pet political theory would have somehow let people make perfect decisions or make rubber gaskets invulnerable to cold weather. It turns out that if you take some task that is incredibly hard and inherently complex and performed by a very large number of extremely qualified and smart people near the limits of human experience, and you want to do that task in a better way it isn't going to boil down to something simple or obvious. In fact, if the US political process is so broken, why is it the only process that ends up with space shuttles sitting in hangers? It's certainly not perfect, but since nobody can point to a political process that results in better space shuttles I don't see any evidence that humans have so far developed a better political process if you are measuring it in units of 'space shuttle reliability'.

dralley 7y ago
If you are not aware, I recommend you look up the design process for the space shuttle. It is a perfect example of engineering taking a backseat to politics. TL;DR version: The original design of the space shuttle was vastly smaller and simpler, but during the cold war the only way you could get something funded was to have a military dual use. So the Department of Defense offered NASA funding so long as they redesign the entire space shuttle to be able to capture and return Soviet satellites to the US -- a task that it never performed -- which required the design to be massively compromised.
dillonmckay 7y ago
Would you consider the Soviet Burans in Kazakhstan ‘sitting in hangers’? The design of those shuttles lacked the flaw that contributed to the Challenger tragedy. So, what was the engineering reason for implementing a US design requiring o-rings?
- tatersolid 7y ago
  Umm... you do know the Buran only launched once with no humans aboard before being scrapped? I’m pretty sure there were plenty of flaws that would have shown up if Buran had flown 100+ real orbital missions.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    The launcher it was to use was hilariously dangerous. (Saturn V is but in a different way.) The thing would be killed before it even a achieved space. At least they managed to salvage the excellent engines out of the project.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    The Russians had the good sense not to sacrifice a dozen human lives on the altar of their space shuttle program. As a direct consequence of that decision, they also still have the ability to launch manned spacecraft, unlike the United States.
philwelch 7y ago
Communism—which is otherwise an intolerably terrible system—led to manned space stations and safer, more reliable manned launch vehicles (namely Soyuz and Shenzhou). It’s a national embarrassment that the US sacrificed billions of dollars and a dozen human lives on the shuttle boondoggle and ended up with no human launch capacity for over a decade and counting. Doing things that are “incredibly hard and inherently complex” and also unnecessary and dangerous is idiotic. Things like building and flying a space shuttle rather than a normal space capsule. Especially when human lives are at stake.