Technology

59534 readers

3199 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

340

NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 16 points 3 months ago

This is exactly it for me. A problem is one thing, a problem can be addressed. But a problem whose core cause is not understood can't be quantified or addressed.

So you have a thruster pack that's overheating and they don't even know why, you have helium that's leaking and they don't even know why, so I ask why is it even a question what to do?

I am among other things a private pilot, I fly little propeller airplanes around for fun. Lots of private pilots do stupid stuff, and some get killed as a result. I'm talking for example pilots who want to get back to their home airport, so they fly over five airports that all sell fuel without landing but then run out of gas and crash half a mile from their home airport. So there is a saying, before you do anything risky, consider how stupid you will look in the NTSB report if it doesn't work out. And the pilot who intentionally flew below fuel minimums looks pretty damn stupid, destroyed a $100,000 airplane and lost his life so he could save 20 bucks on cheaper gas.

Point is, the same principle applies to all of the recent space disasters. Challenger was obviously not the right decision to launch. Columbia obviously a serious risk that was ignored. And that brings us to Starliner, we have serious fundamental problems that could definitely lead to a loss of ship and crew situation and we don't even understand what is causing those problems. Now imagine Starliner fails. How stupid will that decision look? Probably even dumber than Columbia or Challenger, because unlike those two disasters we know ahead of time that something is very wrong.