I'll trust my life on even a small number of experienced engineers to tell the difference between important safety conventions and safety theater.
The challenger disaster happened, after it was launched contrary to Thiokol engineers' objections, because NASA management went down the company's contact list, asking and being rejected by employee after employee, until NASA found someone they could convince to say 'yes', all because someone in NASA's leadership thought that launching before the State of the Union Address would impress the President.
The worst part about safety theater isn't that it takes up excessive resources in general, it's that it redirects resources away from effective empirical safety analysis into a vibes-based safety analysis. When developing the Space Shuttle, NASA had the paperwork to show the risk of a disaster was less than 1 in 100,000. It turned out to be 2 in 135.
I hope NASA can take this opportunity to refocus on a bottom-up management philosophy, trusting engineers to make the right decisions, instead of writing a top-down procedure and assuming safety comes from compliance itself, regardless of what is being complied to.
bediger4000 · 2h ago
Off to read up on early Soviet space program! I'm sure the story of Vladimir Komarov will be the uplifting story we need to motivate us in this direction!
The challenger disaster happened, after it was launched contrary to Thiokol engineers' objections, because NASA management went down the company's contact list, asking and being rejected by employee after employee, until NASA found someone they could convince to say 'yes', all because someone in NASA's leadership thought that launching before the State of the Union Address would impress the President.
The worst part about safety theater isn't that it takes up excessive resources in general, it's that it redirects resources away from effective empirical safety analysis into a vibes-based safety analysis. When developing the Space Shuttle, NASA had the paperwork to show the risk of a disaster was less than 1 in 100,000. It turned out to be 2 in 135.
I hope NASA can take this opportunity to refocus on a bottom-up management philosophy, trusting engineers to make the right decisions, instead of writing a top-down procedure and assuming safety comes from compliance itself, regardless of what is being complied to.