> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.

Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.

That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:

> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.

I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.

With Challenger, engineers said no-go.

With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.

So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.

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GMoromisato 12 hours ago | parent [-]

There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe).

I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.

Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.

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irjustin 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches

It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?

But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.

For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.

> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.

And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.

Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right? This sounds more like there is money in the room than it’s about the money. None of the decision makers personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a prestige thing.
	▲	budman1 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		man, if you need 7 digits, call HP.