alt Hacker NewsI wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away known critical safety problems. Those two things are completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we know should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That's pure insanity.
Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
>Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
How do you explain so many people believing it is safe?
The problem is risks are far too easy to brainstorm, anyone can come up with endless risks that it takes endless time to mitigate.
If I were the manager for challenger, I would have run the o-ring experiment as soon as it was brought up as a concern. Put the fuel pumps in a freezer, test if they leak. Feynman famously demonstrated it with a glass of icewater. Experiment is what separates made up risks from real risks, I would have definitely told the engineers to take a hike and would have hit launch if they couldn't provide experimental evidence of o-ring failure in cold temps. (Spoiler alert: in that case they easily could have)