

The Wrong Stuff: NASA Astronaut on Making and Fixing Mistakes - rfreytag
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/06/28/risky-business-james-bagian-nasa-astronaut-turned-patient-safety-expert-on-being-wrong.aspx

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barrkel
I never knew the Challenger disaster crew survived the explosion. It's a
pretty damning indictment of institutional politics that steps couldn't be
taken for similar situations to be non-fatal.

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damoncali
I used to be a mechanical engineer for several space shuttle missions. You're
missing a critical element. Human space flight is _insanely_ dangerous with
today's technology. Astronauts accept this and NASA's engineers accept this.
The safety requirements for a shuttle launch are voluminous and arcane - to
the point where they restrict the freedom of engineers to solve problems to a
significant degree. Most people don't know that spaceflight technology has
barely improved since the 60's. The primary reason is safety.

That a shuttle (and it's crew) blows up is regrettable, but when you strap a
cargo truck to a giant tank of hydrogen and light it on fire, someone is going
to die from time to time. It's not like they don't know what they're getting
into.

Figuring out how to keep the crew alive after the shuttle's main tank explodes
is just a bad idea. Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out a way to keep
the rockets from coming apart in the first place? How many additional failure
points would you introduce by creating a failsafe for that unlikely case (of
which there are thousands if not millions).

Of course we should learn from failures, but the surest way to kill the space
program is force it to be safer. If anything, they need to inject more risk
into space flight so that better technologies can gain the ever-elusive
"flight heritage". Trust me, astronauts would still line up for a chance to
fly even if you doubled the risk of death.

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mkramlich
> I used to be a mechanical engineer for several space shuttle missions.

I voted you up for this sentence alone. It makes anything else that follows
that you say inherently more valuable to the discussion. thanks for
contributing.

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damoncali
I would hope my comments stood on their own, but sometimes it's necessary to
shed some light on the bias inherent in one's comments... I can't pretend to
be an objective observer on this one.

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projectileboy
This dovetails nicely with Atul Gawande's book "The Checklist Manifesto".
Certainly we can't completely automate medical diagnosis and treatment, but we
could go a lot further than we have thus far.

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RK
I thought one of the best quotes from the interview was _Telling people to be
careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable that way. ... You need a
solution that's not about making people perfect._

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v21
In related space matters: the ISS has a webcam!

Last week I saw a hurricane from space. Yesterday, they were struggling to get
Win2000 to connect to a LAN.

<http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx>

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pavel_lishin
Wait, what is that a webcam of? I see a computer monitor, nothing spacey at
all, and hearing Russian radio chatter.

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v21
Ah, yeah, right now it's switched to a map showing the position. Sadface. But
the last few days it's been showing an interior view, and before that mainly
exterior shots. You get a mission overlay a fair bit, too, which is a shame -
I assume this is when video signal is lost.

The Russian radio chatter is ground talking to astronauts in Russian. There's
also English radio chatter, too.

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wazoox
I've read an article on the very same subject a couple of years ago. It
started with the maiden flight (and crash) of the B-17, and how it then became
the first plane with a check-list. What was it? Wired? The Atlantic?

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rfreytag
BusinessWeek:
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_08/b41670780...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_08/b4167078066671.htm)

More about the B-17 history: How the Pilot's Checklist Came About:
<http://www.atchistory.org/History/checklst.htm>

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CWuestefeld
This is all applicable to our industry as well.

I've tried to foster a culture on my team, where nobody's in trouble when we
find a bug. The only think I want to hear about is (a) how do we fix it, and
(b) how do we prevent it next time.

The only thing that's going to be trouble is trying to hide a bug.

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The_Fox
The title must be an acknowledgement of the oft-mentioned "They Write the
Right Stuff": <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html>

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RyanMcGreal
Actually, they both reference the 1979 Tom Wolfe book:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28book%29>

