Re: Say what you want...
DropBear,
That's all very well - until it turns out that you've got larger problems than a quick investigation will turn up, and you end up killing your cosmonauts live on TV.
It's not exactly very reassuring to say, "we broke a vital component of our rocket at some point in manufacturing, but we don't know how or when. Still that's OK - because it passed all the checks - or there weren't any checks - or people aren't doing the checks properly. But seeing as we don't know which, we'll just invent some new procedures and hope they work.
Meantime our current Soyuz in orbit has a hole in it, that was subsequently crudely covered up with epoxy (presumably by the guilty employee). And that also got through inspection, assuming there was any) and we also still don't know how that happened, when that happened, or how it got through checking, or if it was checked.
Oh and some of our senior leadership decided to publicly accuse the personnel in orbit of doing it, without any evidence or even credible possibility. Because that's really reassuring that management culture is all about solving this problem, rather than just rushing back to full operations with the minimum of arse-covering neccessary.
Yes a quick report can be an opportunity to get back to operations with maximum efficiency. But it can also be an opportunity for a whitewash that's eventually going to get people killed.
You can't just blithely say, "we have a manufacturing quality control problem of unknown dimensions, but fuck-it we're just going to fly anyway."
If NASA have got any sense, they will run a mile from the next launch. I hope they don't get pressured into it because they'll be accused of cowardice for not flying on a rocket the Russians will. Unless they're getting more indications that this is being taken more seriously than it looks to be on the surface. I'll be delighted to be wrong - but I'm seriously worried.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
