
New Doc About Challenger Disaster Out Today - n0pe_p0pe
https://www.wired.com/story/netflixs-challenger-is-a-gripping-look-at-nasa-in-crisis/
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PaulHoule
Diane Vaughn, in the introduction to her book "The Challenger Disaster" warns
readers not to take the conclusion that people most frequently take, which is
that it was all about the O-Rings -- the book is about the operational system
that was used to fly the shuttle successfully 133 times out of 135.

"Normalization of Deviance" at NASA was a top-down system that, flight by
flight, approved variances for hundreds of "unacceptable" risks with the space
shuttle. It was not a scandal that they had meetings about risks that could
cause "catastrophe" \-- if a risk wasn't catastrophic they wouldn't talk about
it at those meetings, they just didn't have time.

Today is it fashionable to say it is "normalization of deviance" because some
doctor doesn't wash his hands after taking a crap or because the captain of a
plane tries to take off even when there is another plane on the runway, but
these are almost all "bottom up" violations of procedures, not the other way
around.

The two shuttle disasters were decided upon in 1976 when the Shuttle was
designed with numerous deadly flaws. Every other manned spacecraft spent a
good chunk of the the budget and at least one nail biting test on a crew
escape system.

Had the designers not "normalized deviance" and done things the way every
other manned spacecraft did, the Challenger astronauts might have been picked
up with a helicopter and been drinking coffee with sailors an hour later --
the astronauts were not killed by the explosion, but rather by the impact with
the ocean.

They didn't do "the right thing" early on because the weight of a crew escape
system would have eaten into the payload capacity, one sign that the mixed
mission of the space shuttle was a mistake.

If you look at Starship and other modern vehicles frequently you see wings
that look vestigial, like the "bat wings" that somebody might draw on the head
or lower back of an anime character.

At hypersonic speed you can use "fins" for wings, and the shuttle would have
been much safer for it if they hadn't had the crazy idea that they wanted to
launch from Vandenberg, overfly Moscow, then go crossrange 1000 miles to land
at Edwards.

The shuttle never flew from Vandenberg but it sure carried around too-large
wings that were vulnerable and killed a crew.

If one thing shocked me about "The Challenger Disaster" it was despite
100,000's of pages of documentation they never set a minimum temperature for a
shuttle takeoff -- although it seems every other technological artifact has a
published operating temperature range.

