Murphy's Law Rules NASA 274
3x37 writes "James Oberg, former long-time NASA operations employee, now journalist, wrote an MSNBC article about the reality of Murphy's Law at NASA. Interesting that the incident that sparked Murphy's Law over 50 years ago had a nearly identical cause as the Genesis probe failure. The conclusion: Human error is an inevitable input to any complex endeavor. Either you manage and design around it or fail. NASA management still often chooses the latter."
Re:interesting but it's not really true (Score:5, Informative)
Re:interesting but it's not really true (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's right (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, has anyone else ever thought an article is based on a Slashdot post one made? [slashdot.org] I was thinking about the exact same similarities last week.
Re:interesting but it's not really true (Score:4, Informative)
Also, there was some kind of semi-critical problem in EVERY SINGLE Apollo mission except Apollo 17, the very last one.
Re:That is NOT correct. (Score:3, Informative)
Sure we've been to the moon. But we haven't done a damn bit of fundimental research since then. (A lot of improvements to our unmanned rocket technology have been bought/borrowed/stolen from the Russian program.)
Comforting quote from the article. (Score:4, Informative)
Very comforting to know how easy it is to wire the safeties on nuclear weapons up backwards.
Re:interesting but it's not really true (Score:4, Informative)
No, but it came damn close. The 'pogo' problem on one of the launches, for example, almost lead to the loss of the Saturn V: if I remember correctly it would have broken up in a few seconds, but one of the engines shut down due to excessive forces and that saved the rocket.
The sad thing is that by the time we launched the last Saturn the worst of the bugs had been resolved, just in time to stop flying them...
Re:interesting but it's not really true (Score:4, Informative)
Take a look at Chapter 5 [speedera.net] of the CAIB Report. You might be especially interested in Section 5.3 - "An Agency Trying To Do Too Much With Too Little." And since you're comparing Apollo era NASA with today's program, look at diagrams 5.3-1 and 5.3-3. In short, the Apollo program enjoyed considerably more funding.