NYT: Minority Report Faults NASA as Compromising Safety

[DeepModem Mom]

Minority Report Faults NASA as Compromising Safety
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 18, 2005


Seven of the 25 members of the group that monitored NASA's progress in making the space shuttle fleet safer after the loss of the Columbia issued a blistering minority report yesterday accusing the space agency's leadership of compromising safety to justify returning to flight.

"It is difficult to be objective based on hindsight, but it appears to us that lessons that should have been learned have not been," the minority wrote, in a document appended to the final report of the group.

Even after two and a half years of intense work to make the shuttles safer, NASA managers "lack the crucial ability to accurately evaluate how much or how little risk is associated with their decisions, particularly decisions to sidestep or abbreviate any given procedure or process," wrote the seven panelists, who included a former astronaut and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Managers and officials, they went on, "must break this cycle of smugness substituting for knowledge."

The minority report, which comes a week after the successful mission of the shuttle Discovery, did not say that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should stop flying the shuttles, and the panel's majority stated that the fleet had been made substantially safer. But the finding is a rebuke to the agency and a warning that a single flight has not solved its problems....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/science/18shuttle.html?hp&ex=1124337600&en=fcf6d5a6b0d19267&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[Spinzonner]

1. They were told essentially the same thing after Challenger

by Feynman. For some reason, they never seem to learn.

or maybe the people chosen to lead NASA are incapable of learning from reality.