It’s fundamentally a human coordination problem that cannot be solved

The more populated and complex an organization gets it becomes impossible to maintain a singular value vector (get these people around the moon safely)

Everyone finds meta vectors (keep my job, reduce my own accountability) that maintain their own individual stability, such that if the whole thing fails they won’t feel liable

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njovin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It can't be solved 100%, but it can be _mostly_ solved with systemic buy-in to the safety culture. Commercial aviation is a great example IMO.

We've spent the last several decades making sure that every single person trained to participate in commercial aviation (maintenance, pilots, attendants, ATC, ground crew) knows their role in the safety culture, and that each of them not only has the power but the _responsibility_ to act to prevent possible accidents.

The Swiss Cheese Model [1] does a great job of illustrating this principle and imparting the importance of each person's role in safety culture.

A big missing piece with manned space flight IMO is the lack of decision-making authority granted to lower staff. A junior pilot acting as first officer on their very first commercial flight with real passengers has the authority to call a go-around even if a seasoned Captain is flying the plane. AFAIK no such 'anyone can call a no-go' exists within NASA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

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pas 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Safety culture requires the ability to learn from mistakes, the capability to ground planes (without that turning into a political problem), and someone to foot the bill. (Which did not always happen, Boeing MCAS with a SPoF AoA sensor without retraining. A chain of cost-cutting decisions. And of course there were usual problems with market distorting subsidies to both Boeing and Airbus.)

NASA's missions are way too big, because the science payloads are unique, so they "can't do" launch early, launch often. And then things sit in storage for years, waiting for budget. (And manned flights are in an even worse situation of course, because they are two-way.)

And there's too much sequential dependency in the marquee projects (without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable), or in other words because of time and cost constraints the projects did not include enough proper development, testing, verification.

NASA is doing too many things, and too much of it is politics. It should be more like a grant organization, rewarding cost-efficient scientific (and engineering) progress, in a specific broad area ("spaaace!"), like the NIH (but hopefully not like the NIH).

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gus_massa 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable

It's strange because unmanned mission are heavy in the "under promise and over deliver" territory. They may say something like "we are sending a car to Mars for a month", but everything is over engineered to last for a year. Then it miraculously work for eleven month and it's a huge success.

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AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you just now learning about propaganda?

	▲	gus_massa an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, it's just strange that different parts of the same organization make oposite decisions for the propaganda.

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ethbr1 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes and... NASA space programs (doing rare, unknown things) are different than commercial aviation (doing a frequent, known thing with high safety). Best be careful applying solutions from the latter to the former.

Layering additional safety layers on top of a fundamentally misaligned organization process also generally balloons costs and delivery timelines (see: NASA).

The smarter play is to better align all stakeholders' incentives, from the top (including the president and Congress) to the bottom, to the desired outcome.

Right now most parties are working towards very different goals.

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randomNumber7 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you miss the Boeing 737max?

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AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, CRM is a disaster you clearly are not in aviation. The reliability in aviation came from incredibly strict regulation and engineering improvements, NOT from structural alignment of parties. They were forced to get safer by the government if you can believe there was a time where the government did anything useful at all.

I could go off for literally hours on this topic but suffice to say I’ve done an unbelievable amount of CRM as an officer in the United States Air Force who flew on and executed 100s of combat missions in Iraq

My friends from Shell 77 are all dead because of CRM failures

Sounds like you need to watch the Rehearsal