"I'm smarter than all those people who build rockets and spacecraft."
Quote from: Blackstar on 09/19/2017 03:05 am"I'm smarter than all those people who build rockets and spacecraft."If you knew Scott's posting history on YouTube, you wouldn't say that. He freely admits to having 'fat thumbs' when playing games and his Kerbal Space Program motto is: "Check your staging!"
Quote from: Ben the Space Brit on 09/20/2017 08:50 amQuote from: Blackstar on 09/19/2017 03:05 am"I'm smarter than all those people who build rockets and spacecraft."If you knew Scott's posting history on YouTube, you wouldn't say that. He freely admits to having 'fat thumbs' when playing games and his Kerbal Space Program motto is: "Check your staging!"And yet, the video is basically "Look at all these stupid people!"I'll admit to having a chip on my shoulder about this (one of many chips, but there you go...): I was an investigator on the CAIB, and one of the things I learned there is that simplistic critiques of very complex failures are pointless, counter-productive, and in the end rather stupid (and ALL spacecraft failures are complex failures). I cringe every time somebody brings up the metric conversion error for Mars Climate Orbiter. They point to it and say "Look! They made a dumb math error! What dummies!" and then they think the issue is settled. The reality is that "dumb math errors" happen for EVERY space program. The issue is not that it happened, but why it was not caught and corrected. That's a deeper question of "why"? What was the root cause, or root causes, of the failure?I realize that he's just creating a light-hearted YouTube video, and who really gives a flying leap? But I think that when people do this, it is often just as illuminating about human psychology as it is about the actual subject. There's a psychological need to point at things and say "the reason that happened is because the people are idiots" because that makes the pointer feel superior. But that's actually a rather useless exercise, because it rarely educates the audiece.
What is particularly educational about his articles is that he demonstrates that quite often there is limited learning from failures. Something fails, there's an investigation, the specific failure mode is identified and corrected, but often people don't address the bigger issues that allowed the failure to happen--or personnel change and the new people are unaware of the lessons learned the hard way by their predecessors.
Then the second type of improvement is in people and processes. We’re adding aa triple sign-off for all work done on the launch pad, on flight components, and flight critical GSE. You have a technician, a responsible engineer, and then quality assurance will sign the final, record all information, and take photographs of all the work that was done, and then make sure that all information is put into our quality assurance database, which is reviewed prior to launch.
I'm sure many people working in the industry and reading this were thinking 'welcome to aerospace'