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Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) m
by CuriousCosmic 2y ago
Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of failure than the Challenger disaster.
But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and again during trainings and testing but was waived away and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred different parts of the rocket instead of on just one.
Either way the point of my original comment was to dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try and pick sides on who was worse.
- renewiltord 2y agoRead The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it’s always a perfect storm because of the variation of Murphy’s Law that’s usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right.
- CuriousCosmic 2y agoOh 100%. Columbia was an organizational failure but it wasn't any one person/org's negligence like Challenger was nor was it a gross disregard/disrespect of the lives of the astronauts/cosmonauts like Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were. My comment was mainly to address the suggestion that those disasters were equivalent to the gross disregard for life that the USSR put their cosmonauts through.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoReading analysis[0] of the damage caused by a foam strike on STS-119 makes the loss of Columbia feel more "on NASA" to me than not. NASA knew a foam strike could be catastrophic and that the odds of a bad strike weren't astronomically remote. It had already happened on STS-119 and only luck prevented loss of the vehicle. I didn't have that take initially, but the Causality podcast did an episode[1] on it a few years ago that got me into reading more about it. [0] https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090327sts27/ https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090327sts27/ [1] https://engineered.network/causality/episode-24-columbia/ https://engineered.network/causality/episode-24-columbia/