I was spending my lunch hour in the school's computer lab, happily programming away on a shiny new Apple IIe. I vaguely recall a ghetto blaster playing some music, probably something from John Cougar or The Cars or The Police. It was a typical winter lunch hour for me in high school. Around me in the computer lab were a half dozen or so other computer geeks, each of us programming or playing Zork or some other activity that computer geeks did in January of 86.
And then a buddy of mine came into the computer lab, and said, "Hey! the Shuttle just blew up".
I remember my words: "Yeah right, fuck you, you're so full of shit." It was a joke; it had to be. But, he protested: no really, it's all over the news, there's video of it on CNN.
And we all just sat there, kind of stunned. The Shuttle blew up? How could this be? This was NASA we were talking about here: this was NASA, who had put men on the moon when myself and the kids around me had been in diapers. This was a space shuttle, the most advanced machine ever assembled.How could it all go so wrong?
There was an inquiry, of course; it turned out that there were no lessons learned from the shuttle disaster that were not already known beforehand. Seventeen years later, NASA would have to be subjected to those exact same painful lessons all over again when the Columbia disintegrated over Texas.
That painful lesson will be repeated over and over again, until NASA figures it out: that just because they have many smart people working there, they are not so smart that they cannot learn from others, nor are they so smart that they can fool the harsh realities of engineering into succumbing to the cleverness of management.
Update: more from Astroprof, Brian Dunbar, Tales of the Heliosphere, Rand Simberg, and a twofer from Mark Whittington here and here.
Technorati Tags: NASA, Space Shuttle, History
No comments:
Post a Comment