Clowns do Clown Stuff

And people die in huge numbers

Many people will remember the Challenger accident. More accurately, there was no accident. Destruction of the spacecraft was due to negligence. Amazing negligence.

I was a young Green Beret in Germany when the spacecraft broke apart. Later, I was back in Gainesville, Florida, at a library for the accident report. I read it cover-to-cover, and other reports. The link below appears to be one report I read. I recall another report from Physicist Richard Feynman. I read that report, too.

The report was a stunning wake up for me. I had imagined NASA as being top dogs on precision, sound judgement, and simply no-kidding full-spectrum extremely serious people.

But reading the report made NASA sound like clown school. As in many disasters, normally there are multiple major errors before the disaster, any one of which if avoided would have made for a good day.

Studying the report I realized NASA made layers of elective errors. Go, No-Go decisions that all should have been NO GO. NO LAUNCH.

Bottom line: the weather was too cold for a safe launch. But due to persistent launch delays and political pressure, the launch director, as I recall, overpowered engineering advice for NO LAUNCH.

I looked at this from the eyes of someone who had been a Green Beret at 19.

I imagined what I would do as launch director. I know what I would have done.

I would NEVER have launched that vehicle due to political pressure when the engineer recommended no launch and that we clearly were out of thermal parameters.

The engineer made very clear the thermal issue with O rings could lead to catastrophic failure, loss of the vehicle and the astronauts.

I would have said tough luck today. We’ll get it tomorrow.

As with the vaxx. It was a simple GO, NO-GO decision.

On another day, when another Shuttle broke up on re-entry, killing all astronauts again, I happened to be with two members of the landing team who would have recovered the vehicle if it had aborted Florida and landed in California instead.

The Columbia orbiter was on re-entry heading to Florida when it broke up over the skies.

The NASA men I was with literally started to cry and drink whiskey. They worked on the shuttles for years. I was very unhappy again.

But the astronauts were dead. Our strategic and wildly expensive shuttle program was a disaster.

And that vehicle went down the same way. A series of amateur mistakes.

Sort of like thousands of vaxxed pilots flying around the world, or sending dozens of F-16s to Ukraine, or billions to “Israel.” A total clown show run by greedy people and moral cowards.

https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_commission_report.pdf