Abandoning Orion for a Next Generation Shuttle?

"Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
wrote:

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:04:03 -0400, John Doe wrote:

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:

Columbia was going to kill a crew, they'd have said something. But at some
point, when you start slicing the salami, you decide, "Well the risk to them
isn't THAT high, but the risk to my career is."

Corporate culture in an outfit like NASA should never be like that. If a
bunch of engineers come to the manager saying that they suspect there
might be more serious damage than earlier thought and that they would
like additional imagery, that manager should think about safety and
never have to worry about his/her carreer.

At my part of NASA I never would have felt I was putting my career on
the line to request more data. I'd have to write a memo that said
exactly what I wanted and why, of course, but it would be silly not
to. How else would the people getting the data for me know what I
wanted if I didn't write it down?

Precisely. I once worked a problem that seemed to require a missile
tube entry and disturbing tactical connections to solve - two things
we avoided doing like the plague.

We didn't enter missile tubes willy-nilly because of the security and
safety issues, ultimately about eight to ten people were involved just
to open the tube hatch and removed the access panel on the side of the
bird. We didn't disturb tactical connections except when directed by
procedure or at great need because of a) the possibility of damaging
the connectors, and b) the need to rerun the tests required to
validate the connection.

Worse yet in my situation, the fault code plainly indicated a probable
failure in 'x' (outside the tube) while my intuition (based on
experience and recent activities in the missile compartment) told me
the failure was far more likely to be in 'y' - inside the tube.

So, under the gun because we had missile down, I had to create a
presentation explaining to the chain-of-command that justified the
tube entry and explained how the documentation was likely to wrong in
this very specific and unusual instance.

As it turned out, I was right - but so was the chain of command in
insisting that I justify myself before committing to a high cost
course of action.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

(Derek Lyons) writes:

Precisely. I once worked a problem that seemed to require a missile
tube entry and disturbing tactical connections to solve - two things
we avoided doing like the plague.

Aha! The veil lifts slightly. I see a past involving deep water and
possibly deep do-do as well....

;-)

Dave