robiner@iris.usc.edu (Steve Robiner) (02/28/90)
Does anyone out there know if the last minutes of the Challenger flight recorder were ever released. If so, where can I get a copy or transcript. About a month or so after the crash, I heard that the NYT was suing NASA for the tape, but that's the last I heard of it. I now see accounts of the crash where NASA officials publicly indicate the crew died at impact (with the ocean) and not during the explosion as originally speculated. =Steve=
clj@ksr.com (Chris Jones) (02/28/90)
In article <23146@usc.edu>, robiner@iris (Steve Robiner) writes: >Does anyone out there know if the last minutes of the Challenger >flight recorder were ever released. If so, where can I get a copy >or transcript. > >About a month or so after the crash, I heard that the NYT was suing >NASA for the tape, but that's the last I heard of it. > >I now see accounts of the crash where NASA officials publicly indicate the >crew died at impact (with the ocean) and not during the explosion as originally >speculated. > >=Steve= The transcripts of the in-cabin voice recorders were released. These pick up conversation in the flight deck (but not the mid-deck) including stuff not transmitted over the radio. I remember reading them in AW&ST. The tape was a continuous loop, I believe, and starts from several minutes before the launch and ends with the explosion, at which time power was lost to the crew cabin. The things I recall were some bantering among the crew concerning the nose cap prematurely retracting (it wasn't), Judy Resnick saying "[shit] hot" at ignition (expletive inferred; NASA censored), and, the last words on the tape, Michael Smith saying "Uh, oh." In one of a string of events in which NASA tarnished its image, they stated two days or so before the transcripts were released that there was no evidence that the crew had any knowledge that things were going wrong, then said that further sound analysis of the tape had revealed Smith's words. NASA's behavior in the aftermath of the accident often seemed to me to be an obvious exercise in damage control to the detriment of finding out what went wrong. As to the morbid details of what happened in the crew cabin after the accident, there is no way of knowing. Certainly the crew's fate was sealed after the breakup, and the only way they would have had to communicate was via handwritten notes (a la the passengers on the JAL 747 which crashed several years ago). In every respect, what happened to the Challenger was non-survivable, and the time spent wondering about the crew's fate is better spent on preventing such accidents. It seems to me that the details of what *caused* the accident are sufficiently well known, and I don't feel a need to know all the lurid details of the tragedy. -- Chris Jones clj@ksr.com uunet!ksr!clj harvard!ksr!clj
sorgatz@ttidca.TTI.COM ( Avatar) (03/03/90)
In article <610@ksr.UUCP> clj@ksr.com (Chris Jones) writes:
+non-survivable, and the time spent wondering about the crew's fate is better
+spent on preventing such accidents. It seems to me that the details of what
+*caused* the accident are sufficiently well known, and I don't feel a need to
+know all the lurid details of the tragedy.
Chris' point is an exellent one, but unfortunately it is lost on the real
target group; namely the big-shot, NASA MBA-managers that were all too
willing to let political oneupsmanship superceed crew safety. The problem
is not a NASA exclusive! In general American management is technically
incompetent, and unwilling to look at the long-term effects of their
decisions. They rely on 'seat-of-the-pants' decisionmaking techniques
that are normally driven by short-term gain preceptions. This is what's
killing business in America!.. ..to say nothing of the loss of 7
volunteers.
Management is always SOOO damn busy tryiny to 'put-the-pickle' to someone
in the next meeting they simply fail to do their advowed task: MANAGE THE
TALENTS AND RESOURCES IN ORDER TO GET A JOB DONE. Hence, I feel that a
large fraction of the multilayered management infrastructure has outlived
it's usefulness...it is obsolete, in a word!
When a solid propellent engineer tells his manager that a launch is not
safe below a certain temperature, that manager has ONLY ONE REAL CHOICE,
to scrub the launch. The idea that politics superceed safety reminds one
of the old joke about the accountant who when interviewing for a job was
asked: "How much is 2 + 2?"..his answer, which got him the job, was: "How
much do you want it to be?". This is faulty thinking when the sceneario
includes limits in materials science!
The sooner we (the scientists, engineers, technicians, etc.) decide to
insist on decisional-autonomy in such matters, the sooner we cast-off a
majority of the management "Charm-School" thinking..and the kind of people
that go for such crap - the sooner will come the day when decisions of
this type are NOT just another political gambit.
comments welcome, flames from MBA-assholes to /dev/null! '73!
--
-Avatar-> (aka: Erik K. Sorgatz) KB6LUY +-------------------------+
Citicorp(+)TTI *----------> panic trap; type = N+1 *
3100 Ocean Park Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90405 +-------------------------+
{csun,philabs,psivax,pyramid,quad1,rdlvax,retix}!ttidca!sorgatz **shafer@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov (Mary Shafer (OFV)) (03/05/90)
In article <10432@ttidca.TTI.COM> sorgatz@ttidca.TTI.COM ( Avatar) writes:
Chris' point is an exellent one, but unfortunately it is lost on the real
target group; namely the big-shot, NASA MBA-managers that were all too
willing to let political oneupsmanship superceed crew safety. The problem
is not a NASA exclusive! In general American management is technically
incompetent, and unwilling to look at the long-term effects of their
decisions.
Virtually all of NASA's line management have _only_ engineering
degrees. Here at Dryden, for example, I would bet that the only MBA's
are in staff positions and there aren't even very many of them (maybe
one or two in Procurement or Financial Management).
The same is true for the rest of Ames Research Center.
NASA does send its managers to training programs, but these are
structured to deal with government situations and bear no resemblence
to an MBA. (My exposure to MBAs tells me this is no great loss :-).
I'm not prepared to estimate when such managers did their last
"Hands-on" engineering, but to criticize them for being MBAs is
incorrect. They are also not technically illiterate, although
I will admit that some of them are not state-of-the-art.
Perhaps the moral is, you don't have to be an MBA to make mistakes.
--
Mary Shafer shafer@skipper.dfrf.nasa.gov or ames!skipper.dfrf.nasa.gov!shafer
NASA Ames Dryden Flight Research Facility, Edwards, CA
Of course I don't speak for NASA