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NASA says astronauts stuck in space will not return on Boeing capsule, will wait for SpaceX craft (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (3 children)

“There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” [Commercial Crew Program manager Steve] Stich said. “If we had a model, [if] we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the de-orbit burn, through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action.”

I think that’s the crucial issue. I feel good that the NASA officials were unanimous on this decision.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Engineering leaders have to work as bullshit detectors. People aren't even necessarily trying to lie, they just built up an unconscious tower of their own ego and it's hard to step back far enough to get them to realize that maybe the surefire solution they are emotionally invested in that's theirs is actually super-sketch. Presumably there's a bunch of people on the Boeing team working thrusters who were totally convinced that they understood it well enough, the simulations all showed it was fine, etc.

But you can't, as a leader, inspect everything in deep detail. So you have to have a shortcut, which is you detect bullshit.

Boeing triggered the bullshit detector. (Or, depending on how you see things, "Boeing finally triggered the bullshit detector") And once you've triggered the bullshit detector, now everything's going to be checked for bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Ah, yes, the BSD.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

You would think, after Challenger and Columbia, that NASA would have a lower threshold for these things as well.