It's not an attack piece, but it's not complementary of NASA. It's pretty much completely fair and if you're gonna be fair, NASA's just gonna look bad. Ultimately you get an explanation of some of the background that led to the decisions, but...yeah, it just wasn't great.
I know anyone likely to watch this is already aware of most of the major stuff with Morton-Thiokol and the O-Rings, but it does a great job of filling in the details and just some of the absolute shit luck that led to it.
It interviews the two decisionmakers who were ultimately best situated to pull the plug on the launch but didn't. It interviews family members of all 7.
It's really pretty remarkable work. I know this stuff better than most and I was still just tense as hell throughout.
Just such an incredible and avoidable tragedy. [Reply]
It was a 50 cent O-Ring that physically caused the disaster. But the real cause was the human ego and ambition.
And no matter where we go or do as humans, that’s always going to be a risk. Those same sometimes ugly traits are also responsible for great leaps forward. [Reply]
Originally Posted by BigRedChief:
It was a 50 cent O-Ring that physically caused the disaster. But the real cause was human ego and ambition.
I mean....it was 38 feet long and wrapped around the entire inner flange of the SRB so it probably cost a tick more than 50 cents...
And again, it's all a tick more complicated than "NASA didn't think anything could go wrong..."
A few people in critical positions did, but what's more surprising than anything was how much everyone trusted someone else. It's amazing to me how often "well we told our suppliers about the situation and they told us X" or "we were assured by Y that there was no issue" happened. And frankly, in an engineering project that complex, I'm really not sure how else you could do it. You have to trust your subcontractors to have straight answers. And in the end it really all came down to just a couple of people succumbing to pressure (as both bureaucrats and business leaders on either side of the dialogue).
The 'ambition' was damn near necessary to secure Congressional funding. The ego problem...well again, I think it mostly just came down to trust more than arrogance. A lot of people put their faith in folks to have the right answers. And a lot of 'em DID have the right answers.
But I think NASA writ large took more shit for it than was necessary. In their perfect world, they wouldn't have wanted these kinds of pressures either. But they had commitments to congress. Vendors/suppliers had commitments to them.
And powerful people who are in those positions oftentimes forget the impact their presence and/or frustration can have on people on the other end of the conversation. I've seen it - shit I've done it. When you have a significant role, people don't want to give you bad news and when you make it clear that you're going to take something as bad news, they'll bend over backwards to give you a different answer even if you haven't directly compelled them to do so.
Watch the documentary. NASA doesn't come of smelling like a rose by any means, but there's a lot of nuance and additional context that's helpful in a full understanding of what all transpired. [Reply]
Originally Posted by RINGLEADER:
It’s worth watching. Probably one episode longer than it needs to be but I found it interesting.
The last episode got a little schlocky with the long whimsical looks towards the end.
But the first 2/3 of it really hammered home the emotional resonance of it all. It also did a good job of circling back on the primary actors on the decision-making side and how they look back on what transpired and how they've handled the fallout.
It wasn't strictly necessary, but it was effective as an epilogue, IMO. [Reply]
In the process of watching it now and its really good.
I found it interesting the timing of it all, coming off the tensions of the 70s that somewhat parallel today's social climate. It got me thinking, in this current state of rapidly moving technology, global collaborations, buzzsaw news cycles, and gnat-like attention spans, can there be a "something" with enough wow factor that unifies people at a national level like the space shuttle once did?
I remember watching those SpaceX boosters auto land themselves like a year or so ago and thinking 'holy shit thats amazing' and haven't watched one since. Feel we could land a woman on Venus and people would be like Doritos bringing back the Guac flavor! [Reply]
Watched this and learned a lot. There was a lot of political pressure on NASA, but then NASA made promises to Congress in order to get funding that they simply couldn't live up to. It's not that NASA knew that things would go wrong. It just took something going wrong to stop believing that crossing their fingers and getting lucky would keep getting them by. It took a disaster happening in order for the higher ups to completely stop and fix the potential problems. [Reply]
I watched the first episode last weekend and intend to watch more. I hate to ask this-- but I am morbidly curious; did they discuss any details about the crew's fate after the explosion? I read some disturbing things several years ago that there was actually flight data recordings of them speaking with one another in the cabin before impact.
Didn't mean to derail this-- but again I cannot help but think about their final moments. [Reply]