Jeff Findley wrote on Sat, 13 Oct 2018
09:43:55 -0400:

In article ,
says...


AND THIS JUST IN:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45842731

"Speaking in Moscow, Nasa head Jim Bridenstine said he expected a
December mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to go ahead as
planned."

To me, this points to initial investigation pointing to either a sensor
malfunction when everything was working well, ...


Nope. You really need to avoid giving serious consideration to how
things 'seem' to you or what you think facts might 'point' to. You
are almost inevitably wrong.


... or they already identified
what failed and know what to check on the new rocket before granting it
right to fly.


They know WHAT happened. What they don't know is WHY it happened.


Agreed. And the fact that Russia is still planning on launching the
next Soyuz on time, presumably with a crew on board, is indicative of
how they handle these investigations. They assign blame as quickly as
possible, fix the singular issue which was blamed, and start flying
again as quickly as possible. All other issues are ignored in the
interest of flying again as quickly as possible.


Russian authorities claim the investigation will be completed by the
20th.


The press even called this a "criminal investigation". The connotations
of this are not good if you are one of the workers who build the vehicle
or one of the people who are supposed to be part of quality assurance
procedures.


Actually they're not making these rockets anymore. They have a bunch
of them in storage and when they need one they pull it out of the
warehouse and assemble the stages. Russia says that the QC on
boosters that are going to carry people is much more stringent than
otherwise.


This is the polar opposite of what NASA does which is pause everything
for an indeterminate amount of time to allow everyone to review their
systems looking for trends or ways it could fail. This is absolutely
encouraged and not punished. This is why after each major accident,
*many* issues are found, brought to the attention of management, and
these issues are addressed in some way.


Somewhere between those two approaches is probably the right approach.
Groups should be looking for 'random **** that's wrong' all the time,
not just when investigating an accident. Stuff that couldn't
contribute to the accident under consideration should be eliminated
from the tree early.


Let's not sugar coat this. Russia has had a **** poor reliability
record over the life of ISS. Three Progress resupply vessels never made
it to ISS and the latest one of those was yet another launch failure. I
think they have a systemic quality assurance problem which is partly
driven by cultural differences that make that job very difficult. They
assign blame, shoot the messenger, whatever you want to call it instead
of encouraging an environment of continuous improvement.


Russia has had around three rockets fail a year. They're just not
typically the manned ones. So maybe there's some truth to those
getting more QC attention.


For ISS this is a good thing, because it means it very likely won't have
to be de-crewed for any length of time. This reduces the chance that
ISS will break when it is without a crew and can't be fixed remotely.
So this increases the chance that the ISS program will continue to
succeed.


We're a long way from having to decrew ISS. The current crew can stay
another six months and the Soyuz can be replaced by an unmanned flight
using the hardware originally scheduled to take crew up in December.

But, this is a bad thing for the safety astronauts who have to use Soyuz
vessels to get to/from ISS. They don't really know what might happen
next because Russia just fixed that one thing that went wrong and
immediately started flying again.


I'm not sure they're even doing that. It sounds to me like what
they're going to do is just inspect the **** out of the rockets in
storage and see if they find anything wrong, even if they don't know
exactly what they're looking for.


--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to
live in the real world."
-- Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden