this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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You're absolutely right. I need to be more precise. The shuttle era of NASA was absolutely brilliant scientists and engineers, doing groundbreaking work, supporting a corps of astronauts of unparalleled skill and courage, and all under a management team that was the most godawful bunch of fuckups and incompetents you could possibly imagine. Everyone knew that the shuttle was unsafe, and they kept flying it anyway, until it inevitably led to the totally unnecessary deaths of some astronauts, and then they kept at it under more or less the exact same methodology until it killed some more.
I still get goosebumps from some of the old Apollo-era legends like SCE to AUX or scratching marks in the window to compute the landing navigation by hand. The 1980s-era NASA administrators inherited a engineering organization that was basically able to do the impossible, and was the envy of the entire world, and they basically started running it with the mentality "as long as nothing went wrong this time it's not a problem. How can we get it a little cheaper or faster for the next one?"
Mike Mullane goes into a lot of good detail about it in "Riding Rockets." Basically, the nature of the program was such that all the astronauts knew it was just a matter of time until one of the shuttles malfunctioned in deadly and preventable fashion, and they wished it wasn't so but that was the bargain they made to be able to go to space. He said his only worry was that he'd do something dumb, or panic on the radio, and there would be this recording of him losing his shit that was his final legacy. He said as long as he could keep himself together if something did go wrong that would kill him, and he got to get to space, he was alright with that.
He was actually on one flight that would have blown up, absolutely guaranteed, but something else went wrong and they scrubbed the mission and all got back out of the shuttle and went home. They found the problem afterwards while they were refitting for the flight after that. But if they'd launched he'd be dead. He talks about his friends who did die in the accidents, and his anger and frustration at the management failures that led to them so inevitably. Space flight is dangerous anyway, but if you approach it without caution and respect, people die who don't need to. Some of them were his friends, and it's impossible to read him talking about it without getting angry at the system that made it that way.
So yeah, I was wrong in pointing the finger at NASA as a whole, you're 100% right. NASA management though can get fucked. I don't know if it's better now, but I'm pretty confident in saying that this particular guy is one of the fuckers who's part of the movement that was and is making it bad. So fuck him. As far as my brief Wikipedia research has led me is to conclude that he's a part of the problem.
Edit: https://spaceagechronicle.com/schirra-proved-astronauts-can-successfully-control-a-spacecraft/
I’ve read the book - it’s excellent and heartbreaking. The pendulum of safety swings back and forth - Columbia was 17 years after Challenger. Granted, we aren’t flying it anymore, but in terms of human spaceflight at NASA it’s been 21 years since Columbia. Everyone is hypervigilant and risk averse for a time as the lessons that were learned are still being discovered and people want to know how to avoid doing that thing again.
But over time, memories fade, people come and go, knowledge is lost and forgotten. And now with commercial space - “move fast and break things” if you will - they don’t like government or regulations or being told no.
So IMO, it’s just a matter of time until something else goes terribly wrong. For all of NASA’s faults, they did take the time to learn both culturally within the organization and technically (I can personally attest to this). They paused the program for a couple of years after both Shuttle accidents to learn how and why they failed.
That’s important and I’m not optimistic that those hoping to profit off of human spaceflight will be inclined to do the same when they fuck up.
Yeah. I can't even remember what I was reading recently about how they were going to open up some new avenue of commercial space travel, and I remember thinking: Oh, so it's gonna be like Mt. Everest. You're gonna go and there are gonna be dead spacecraft with bodies inside, because they're not being careful enough for it to be rare that things go wrong. And you're just gonna go past 'em to get where you're going.
I'm not even necessarily saying it's a bad thing, as long as the people signing up know what they're getting into. But it's different from how I imagined it.
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SCE to AUX
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