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The film “Challenger: The Final Flight” on Netflix includes interviews with the most important participants in the launch decision, including McDonald. (It also

by zb 6y ago

The film “Challenger: The Final Flight” on Netflix includes interviews with the most important participants in the launch decision, including McDonald. (It also has interviews with many of the astronauts’ families and does a great job at putting their experience front and centre.) The guy whose job it was to send the fax because he happened to be the one who knew how to operate the fax machine is to this day utterly devastated; weeping. The MTI VP who signed off (although the decision was made above his head) admits that he agreed with it at the time, but acknowledges it was a mistake. He’s being interviewed in a large room full of very expensive furniture. The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.

geofft 6y ago
You don't manage to get that high up the ladder if you let a silly thing like your conscience bother you. (This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)
- xapata 6y ago
  I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves without conscience. Quite the opposite.
  - bostonsre 6y ago
    I think there are people in both the camps. There are some with consciences that believe in doing the right thing, but also those that are in the sociopath camp. The news is full of the bad leaders that take ridiculous risks (e.g. Boeing) but the good guys don't make the news often.
    - geofft 6y ago
      If there had been good people in power at NASA at the time, the most important thing they could have done to save lives (not to mention run an effective organization) would be to refuse to promote folks without a demonstrable conscience to management positions. It's all well and good to celebrate Allan McDonald for courageously speaking up, but the hard question is this: had Larry Mulloy or George Hardy ever been in the position where they had to make a decision about whether to courageously speak up, at any point between when they joined NASA and when they got their management roles? If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience - you simply have no data about what happens when they have to make tough calls. And in fact your process is slightly biased against people who do, because sometimes people who don't will take an unwise risk and get lucky. And so over time, as long as disasters remain less common as worries about disasters, the folks who don't listen to their consciences get a little bit more done during their career compared to their peers. We know that Thiokol demoted McDonald for speaking up and sidelined the others who also did. This is a system that systematically avoids empowering the good guys. (And, from all evidence, Mulloy and Hardy were highly capable engineers. I'm not saying NASA should have never hired them - they should have had senior IC roles to fit their strengths and NASA should have looked for folks more like McDonald to make the launch decisions.)
      - burrows 6y ago
        > If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience How can we possibly know if someone else listens to their conscience? Their conscience is not accessible to anyone else.
        geofft 6y ago
        I mean, we can go back to the original article for that. Why are we praising McDonald? Why did his obituary get posted here, and why did Mulloy, who passed in October, not get any press? Their consciences were unknowable, yes, but fortunately we're not actually looking for the ineffable conscience. McDonald did a praiseworthy thing, which we wish to encourage. And maybe Mulloy had a stronger conscience, but he just was more deferential to the pressure on him to launch. Maybe he did listen carefully to his conscience, but he had too much of a sense of optimism and so didn't internalize the worry. Who knows? In the end, whatever the reason, he pushed for Challenger to launch. We're looking for whether someone is empirically willing to make a decision that's unpopular but right, whatever the reason. If they did something like McDonald did, where they were under pressure (including career pressure) to do something, they refuse to do it, and the data eventually shows they had good reason for it, then you've got some data. If they do like his colleague Bob Ebeling did and they write a memo to upper management because they don't feel their direct management is taking concerns seriously, you've got some data, too. What I'm saying is that, if the person you're considering promoting has never faced a hard decision, and you're promoting them because they had the good fortune to face years of easy decisions through which they could do high-quality work, you know you don't have any data. I agree that it's hard to get the data (and there are obvious problems with that metric turning into a target), but if you don't even try, you're certainly not going to succeed. All the engineering process in the world will not save you if your hiring and promotion processes incentivize the wrong things. Hence my question: did NASA have a process for deciding that Mulloy and Hardy were good at making life-or-death decisions, or did it simply have a process that determined that they were good engineers?
  - M2Ys4U 6y ago
    > I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves without conscience. Quite the opposite. Some might, and just not care. Psychopaths aren't that rare (although how frequent the incidence is within Nasa is I have no idea)
    - ghosty141 6y ago
      > Psychopaths aren't that rare Any evidence for that statement? Wikipedia and its sources suggest otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Frequency > 1.2% of a US sample scored 13 or more out of 24, indicating "potential psychopathy" Those 1.2% are only "potential psychopaths" so the real number might be even less. An illness that only affects <1% of a population can definitely be seen as rare.
  - spacemanmatt 6y ago
    Funny thing about power ladders and sociopaths, though... they do love to climb.
- 177tcca 6y ago
  Don't have 300 rung ladders.
- simonh 6y ago
  Alan McDonald, the subject of this thread, is clear proof that this is obviously false. The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    Is it though? The company demoted him and his career was only saved by direct intervention from the congress.
  - geofft 6y ago
    Not a single person with McDonald's sense of ethics had the authority to scrub the launch. And multiple ICs, not just McDonald, had serious reservations. If you want to say that my "You don't" is technically false because, if you listen to your conscience, you might get proven right after seven people die and a major investigation happens that remains world news for decades afterwards, and even then you'll get demoted and sidelined until the US Congress intervenes, then ... yes, you can. I will rephrase to "You usually don't." (But even so, that just gets you promoted at Thiokol, and my statement stands for NASA.) Why didn't anyone scrub Columbia's launch? Why did the investigation board say that NASA had most of the same cultural and leadership flaws that the Rogers Commission had raised concerns about? The SREs have a saying, "Hope is not a strategy." You can hope that the person you promote will have a sense of ethics, and maybe they will, but that does nothing to ensure that you'll have ethical decision-making.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    It it were true, the management would face consequences and McDonald would have been put in charge, instead he was sidelined. How many people do C-levels have to kill for heads to roll?
softwaredoug 6y ago
It's interesting to contrast this with the Chernobyl HBO documentary. Both are engineering disasters, both have very complicated cultural and political underpinnings to why they were allowed to happen. It's not to say the Challenger disaster is comparable to the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, but more crucially: what if the same poor incentives and decisions in place that cause Challenger caused other engineering disasters in the US.
- oivey 6y ago
  HBO’s Chernobyl is more of a dramatization than a documentary. It certainly doesn’t contain interviews of people who were actually involved. There are quite a few good bits highlighting the dangers of nuclear energy, particularly in the context of the Soviet bureaucracy, but there also a few liberties taken with the science and reality of the event. The fact that people think of it is a documentary despite that is also concerning.
  - xapata 6y ago
    I had assumed from the comment that there were two shows, one a dramatization and one a documentary. Surely no one thinks that fiction was a documentary?!
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      I have friends who keep citing 'The Big Short' for what's wrong with our financial system. A lot of people can't tell the difference between fact movies and fiction movies. And that doesn't even get into clearly biased documentaries (but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment...)
      - gruez 6y ago
        >but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment Given the recent thread on adam curtis documentaries I'm inclined to believe the opposite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448
xwolfi 6y ago
I saw the interview you're talking about and I admit I respect it. He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or make it and broke it. You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
- refurb 6y ago
  I had the same takeaway. The guys attitude was “if you want to travel in space you need to take risks and based on what I knew this was a risk worth taking”. Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it’s not his life that’s at risk, but he does have a point (not necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more generally speaking).
  - irjustin 6y ago
    That's what Feynman's issue was as he reported it in the Roger's Commission[0]. Is they _didn't_ understand the risk when they thought. Management thought the risk of lost was 1 in 100,000 which is launching everyday for 274 years. Engineers polled was 1:50 to 1:200. Obviously a massive disconnect. The thing that gets me is they broke their own protocol operating below 53'F. This wasn't a calculated risk where it's 1-2 degrees out of spec, it's wildly out of spec, below freezing into a completely unknown, untested and un-spec'ed space. This is what frustrates me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_of_Richard_Feynman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_...
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Since we are already comparing Challenger to Chernobyl, that fact is a common thread isn't it? Ignoring temp specs, and at Chernobyl they ignored power and operation specs. In case of Challenger to get a launch, and in case of Chernobyl to conduct a test.
  - zb 6y ago
    He had no idea whether it was a risk worth taking or not, because they rejected any evidence short of certainty that the O-rings would fail on a given flight. The results of the Rogers Commission make this abundantly clear to anybody who cares to pay attention, yet he professes to have learned nothing.
ngngngng 6y ago
> The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying. I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off the charts.
- snissn 6y ago
  While we’re dunking on nasa , I gave my resume to a recruiter for the nasa jet propulsion lab at a career fair and he said they’d call me and they never called me. Bunch of liars!
- garmaine 6y ago
  Well I did work at NASA, although I left for the private sector to finish my career, and this does not describe 99% of the people I met. In the circles I ran in there was a great deal of humility and respect for process as something which saves lives. Maybe it depends on the center? Which part of NASA did your friends work at?
  - JesseMeyer 6y ago
    I'm at GSFC, and arrogance is definitely not a character trait of those on my team. Earth science may select for a different type of persona.
    - Daho0n 6y ago
      Now the question is, is he wrong? Or are you proving his point? If he is indeed correct your post could still be true seen with your eyes.
      - JesseMeyer 6y ago
        If my personal experience is helpful to those trying to answer those questions then great, but I don't know the answer to them.

by zb 6y ago

geofft 6y ago

You don't manage to get that high up the ladder if you let a silly thing like your conscience bother you. (This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)

xapata 6y ago
I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves without conscience. Quite the opposite.
- bostonsre 6y ago
  I think there are people in both the camps. There are some with consciences that believe in doing the right thing, but also those that are in the sociopath camp. The news is full of the bad leaders that take ridiculous risks (e.g. Boeing) but the good guys don't make the news often.
  - geofft 6y ago
    If there had been good people in power at NASA at the time, the most important thing they could have done to save lives (not to mention run an effective organization) would be to refuse to promote folks without a demonstrable conscience to management positions. It's all well and good to celebrate Allan McDonald for courageously speaking up, but the hard question is this: had Larry Mulloy or George Hardy ever been in the position where they had to make a decision about whether to courageously speak up, at any point between when they joined NASA and when they got their management roles? If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience - you simply have no data about what happens when they have to make tough calls. And in fact your process is slightly biased against people who do, because sometimes people who don't will take an unwise risk and get lucky. And so over time, as long as disasters remain less common as worries about disasters, the folks who don't listen to their consciences get a little bit more done during their career compared to their peers. We know that Thiokol demoted McDonald for speaking up and sidelined the others who also did. This is a system that systematically avoids empowering the good guys. (And, from all evidence, Mulloy and Hardy were highly capable engineers. I'm not saying NASA should have never hired them - they should have had senior IC roles to fit their strengths and NASA should have looked for folks more like McDonald to make the launch decisions.)
    - burrows 6y ago
      > If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience How can we possibly know if someone else listens to their conscience? Their conscience is not accessible to anyone else.
      - geofft 6y ago
        I mean, we can go back to the original article for that. Why are we praising McDonald? Why did his obituary get posted here, and why did Mulloy, who passed in October, not get any press? Their consciences were unknowable, yes, but fortunately we're not actually looking for the ineffable conscience. McDonald did a praiseworthy thing, which we wish to encourage. And maybe Mulloy had a stronger conscience, but he just was more deferential to the pressure on him to launch. Maybe he did listen carefully to his conscience, but he had too much of a sense of optimism and so didn't internalize the worry. Who knows? In the end, whatever the reason, he pushed for Challenger to launch. We're looking for whether someone is empirically willing to make a decision that's unpopular but right, whatever the reason. If they did something like McDonald did, where they were under pressure (including career pressure) to do something, they refuse to do it, and the data eventually shows they had good reason for it, then you've got some data. If they do like his colleague Bob Ebeling did and they write a memo to upper management because they don't feel their direct management is taking concerns seriously, you've got some data, too. What I'm saying is that, if the person you're considering promoting has never faced a hard decision, and you're promoting them because they had the good fortune to face years of easy decisions through which they could do high-quality work, you know you don't have any data. I agree that it's hard to get the data (and there are obvious problems with that metric turning into a target), but if you don't even try, you're certainly not going to succeed. All the engineering process in the world will not save you if your hiring and promotion processes incentivize the wrong things. Hence my question: did NASA have a process for deciding that Mulloy and Hardy were good at making life-or-death decisions, or did it simply have a process that determined that they were good engineers?
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  > I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves without conscience. Quite the opposite. Some might, and just not care. Psychopaths aren't that rare (although how frequent the incidence is within Nasa is I have no idea)
  - ghosty141 6y ago
    > Psychopaths aren't that rare Any evidence for that statement? Wikipedia and its sources suggest otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Frequency > 1.2% of a US sample scored 13 or more out of 24, indicating "potential psychopathy" Those 1.2% are only "potential psychopaths" so the real number might be even less. An illness that only affects <1% of a population can definitely be seen as rare.
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  Funny thing about power ladders and sociopaths, though... they do love to climb.
177tcca 6y ago
Don't have 300 rung ladders.
simonh 6y ago
Alan McDonald, the subject of this thread, is clear proof that this is obviously false. The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.
- jiofih 6y ago
  Is it though? The company demoted him and his career was only saved by direct intervention from the congress.
- geofft 6y ago
  Not a single person with McDonald's sense of ethics had the authority to scrub the launch. And multiple ICs, not just McDonald, had serious reservations. If you want to say that my "You don't" is technically false because, if you listen to your conscience, you might get proven right after seven people die and a major investigation happens that remains world news for decades afterwards, and even then you'll get demoted and sidelined until the US Congress intervenes, then ... yes, you can. I will rephrase to "You usually don't." (But even so, that just gets you promoted at Thiokol, and my statement stands for NASA.) Why didn't anyone scrub Columbia's launch? Why did the investigation board say that NASA had most of the same cultural and leadership flaws that the Rogers Commission had raised concerns about? The SREs have a saying, "Hope is not a strategy." You can hope that the person you promote will have a sense of ethics, and maybe they will, but that does nothing to ensure that you'll have ethical decision-making.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  It it were true, the management would face consequences and McDonald would have been put in charge, instead he was sidelined. How many people do C-levels have to kill for heads to roll?

softwaredoug 6y ago

It's interesting to contrast this with the Chernobyl HBO documentary. Both are engineering disasters, both have very complicated cultural and political underpinnings to why they were allowed to happen. It's not to say the Challenger disaster is comparable to the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, but more crucially: what if the same poor incentives and decisions in place that cause Challenger caused other engineering disasters in the US.

oivey 6y ago
HBO’s Chernobyl is more of a dramatization than a documentary. It certainly doesn’t contain interviews of people who were actually involved. There are quite a few good bits highlighting the dangers of nuclear energy, particularly in the context of the Soviet bureaucracy, but there also a few liberties taken with the science and reality of the event. The fact that people think of it is a documentary despite that is also concerning.
- xapata 6y ago
  I had assumed from the comment that there were two shows, one a dramatization and one a documentary. Surely no one thinks that fiction was a documentary?!
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    I have friends who keep citing 'The Big Short' for what's wrong with our financial system. A lot of people can't tell the difference between fact movies and fiction movies. And that doesn't even get into clearly biased documentaries (but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment...)
    - gruez 6y ago
      >but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment Given the recent thread on adam curtis documentaries I'm inclined to believe the opposite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448

xwolfi 6y ago

I saw the interview you're talking about and I admit I respect it. He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or make it and broke it. You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.

refurb 6y ago
I had the same takeaway. The guys attitude was “if you want to travel in space you need to take risks and based on what I knew this was a risk worth taking”. Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it’s not his life that’s at risk, but he does have a point (not necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more generally speaking).
- irjustin 6y ago
  That's what Feynman's issue was as he reported it in the Roger's Commission[0]. Is they _didn't_ understand the risk when they thought. Management thought the risk of lost was 1 in 100,000 which is launching everyday for 274 years. Engineers polled was 1:50 to 1:200. Obviously a massive disconnect. The thing that gets me is they broke their own protocol operating below 53'F. This wasn't a calculated risk where it's 1-2 degrees out of spec, it's wildly out of spec, below freezing into a completely unknown, untested and un-spec'ed space. This is what frustrates me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_of_Richard_Feynman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_...
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Since we are already comparing Challenger to Chernobyl, that fact is a common thread isn't it? Ignoring temp specs, and at Chernobyl they ignored power and operation specs. In case of Challenger to get a launch, and in case of Chernobyl to conduct a test.
- zb 6y ago
  He had no idea whether it was a risk worth taking or not, because they rejected any evidence short of certainty that the O-rings would fail on a given flight. The results of the Rogers Commission make this abundantly clear to anybody who cares to pay attention, yet he professes to have learned nothing.

ngngngng 6y ago

> The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying. I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off the charts.

snissn 6y ago
While we’re dunking on nasa , I gave my resume to a recruiter for the nasa jet propulsion lab at a career fair and he said they’d call me and they never called me. Bunch of liars!
garmaine 6y ago
Well I did work at NASA, although I left for the private sector to finish my career, and this does not describe 99% of the people I met. In the circles I ran in there was a great deal of humility and respect for process as something which saves lives. Maybe it depends on the center? Which part of NASA did your friends work at?
- JesseMeyer 6y ago
  I'm at GSFC, and arrogance is definitely not a character trait of those on my team. Earth science may select for a different type of persona.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    Now the question is, is he wrong? Or are you proving his point? If he is indeed correct your post could still be true seen with your eyes.
    - JesseMeyer 6y ago
      If my personal experience is helpful to those trying to answer those questions then great, but I don't know the answer to them.