On Sat, Sep 13, 2003 at 04:06:41PM -0400, Andrew Case wrote: > > On Saturday, September 13, 2003, at 04:14 AM, Randall Clague wrote: > > >On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:44:08 -0400 (EDT), Henry Spencer > ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>The "documentation" is mostly part of the problem, not part of the > >>solution. Its presence, in overwhelming profusion, should lead you to > >>expect more of this, not less. > > > >We were talking about this at work today. One person expressed the > >opinion that it's human nature not to check something you know was > >fine last week. I got my back up: "That's WHY you FOLLOW the > >CHECKLIST." > > This is also why it's incumbent on the checklist writer to make an > easy-to-follow checklist, and on whoever designs the procedure to make > an easy to follow procedure, and on whoever designs the equipment to > design in such a way as to make it easy to do the right thing and hard > to do the wrong things, etc. etc. This is a little hard to do in an R&D > environment where flexibility is important, but even there the people > doing the checklists and procedures have choices about how to set them > up. It's tempting to say "just do it right" but reality is that humans > tend to make certain kinds of errors more easily than others, and > taking that into account reduces the chances of mistakes like this one. > I get the impression that NASA in particular has a Superman complex > about people's ability to follow complex, poorly written, jargon heavy > documentation and checklists.
They do (or at least, did, 10 years ago when I worked in the satellite biz) Not only that, but there are often multiple reporting parties, with *different* checklist items, some of which, are incompatible. One of the satellites I worked on, had payloads from 3 diff govt TLAs, all paranoid re: security, and all absolutely sure each of the others was out to sabo their payload. :( NASA is no better there. Once you get off the production floor. It's nothing but bureaucratic butt covering. In some cases, what the checklists tell you to do, is flat out *wrong* written by some pinhead who never turned a tourquewrench or assembled so much as a tinker toy. The only thing that keeps the companies like LM in the satellite business, is the cost of the launches. They can charge a fortune, because that's what it costs to get the payload up there, might as well make it an expensive payload. Case in point, We (TRW at the time) were launching a payload on a Titan IV out of pad 41 at the cape. The comm went through 5 agencies, between the payload, and our operations room. USAF (who owned the payload),LM (who owned the launcher), NASA (who owned the launch pad), A company called (IIRC) COMTELSAT, (who owned the comm shack) and a TLA who really owned the payload. Every single one of them, could, and did, muck with our comm system. Including during battery test and purge. It was incredible. In one case, COMTELSAT rearranged the patch panel in the shack, breaking our monitoring of the satellite, less than 48hrs before launch. Without telling anyone. <grr> 10 years later, and I am *still* ticked off... I *hope* (without much in the way of faith) that it has improved since then. I worked with a lot of really good, sharp people, in the TLAs and the companies, but the system they had to work with, was flat out broken. > > The details of this particular incident make me wonder what kind of > magic bolts they were using that they didn't have plenty of them lying > around. Perhaps the bolt requisition paperwork was just too complicated > and it was much easier just to steal them from someone else's stand :-) > Flight rated hardware, or rather, rated for carrying flight loads. Each bolt was probably hand made, on a CNC lathe, at great cost, and individually magnafluxed and whatnot, every few months. -- Jim Richardson http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock Linux, because eventually, you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork() _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
