Scientist who warned of shuttle problems has died

[PennLady]

This from the NYT, so be aware you may need an account to read it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/roger-boisjoly-73-dies-warned-of-shuttle-danger.html

Roger Boisjoly, who warned against launching Challenger because of possible seal failures (and other things), died about a month ago.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, regrets.

Interested in what made you post this. Lots of great men and women die every day. Why him, why now?

 

[PennLady]

I just happened to see it. True, lots of people die every day, but I don't see all the obits. I was scanning the front page of the NYT and saw this. I also think that it's one of those stories that makes you shake your head -- a tragedy that could have been avoided but people were too scared of various things and so they went ahead over objections.

As for why now -- well, again, I just happened to see it, but if you look at the article, I think the dateline was yesterday. It says in the article he died about a month ago but I guess the family didn't go public with it or anything until now.

 

[Handley_Page]

I sincerely hope he wasn't the last of the engineers to yell "Hold everything"
and face down political pressure.

 

[TE999]

The heat was on NASA to launch Challenger since Congress was considering cutting the budget for the shuttle program. Thiokol didn't want to lose their contract. NASA didn't want to lose funding. BOOM!

 

[PennLady]

This is an interesting article (well, I think) that was published prior to Columbia's launch in 1980. The author is Gregg Easterbrook, who is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written several books, and writes the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at ESPN. This doesn't have anything about Boisjoly (it predates that) but has some thoughts on the shuttle program, some of which came to be.

 

[PennLady]

Here are some opposite views of the article and writer I linked to above. Seems only fair to present opposing thoughts.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1872/1

http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/002084.html

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I sincerely hope he wasn't the last of the engineers to yell "Hold everything"
and face down political pressure.

I'm sure he wasn't, but I can say from personal experience how hard and frightening it can be to stand up to peers and superiors in a company setting and tell them they're making a mistake. The eyes all turn to you, the room goes quiet, and you feel your reputation and your job all suddenly on the line.

And when your objection is based on a few calculations or some brief experiment, it's even worse. How can you be sure you're right when everyone else says things are okay and this is the way they've done it for years and so-and-so's data says things will be fine?

If you're wrong, you're fucked, and if you're right, you're usually fucked too because you made your bosses look bad, and they don't usually give out medals for that.

It's unfortunate, but being a whistle-blower very often ruins your life, and I've seen guys who did the right thing like Boisjoly end up friendless, jobless, and destroyed.

 

[Baudie]

I am also an engineer, and there is an engineering personality type who loves to cry gloom, doom and despair about every design or program. It makes them feel important. These chicken littles huff and puff that they are the only ones taking things seriously. Of course nothing is perfect, and sometimes something does slip through the cracks. Then they stand up and take credit for having warned us all, although the thing they complained about was seldom the root cause. Sort of like predicting an earthquake and taking credit for a tornado.

Not that corruption and greed don't sometimes rise and real problems occur as a result. But balance needs to be given. Most doctors would rather heal you than make more money. Most engineers take safety very seriously. Most clergymen are not predators.

PS to previous poster. Just in case it seems so, this was not directed at you, as I have zero knowledge of your individual situation.

 

[sr71plt]

I'm sure he wasn't, but I can say from personal experience how hard and frightening it can be to stand up to peers and superiors in a company setting and tell them they're making a mistake. The eyes all turn to you, the room goes quiet, and you feel your reputation and your job all suddenly on the line.

I know that feeling. In my last year in a federal government job my news agency office was restructuring systems and procedures for the Internet age, and I was the office director’s representative to sit in on all system’s meetings and to interject what the director wanted and to point out where plans for one aspect of the build weren’t melding with plans for other aspects of the builds. I could see how committee chairs would tighten up and watch me during briefings just waiting for me to flip a spanner into their work—and I could also see the director tighten up when I came into his office to let him know what wasn’t working.

Invariably the engineers were designing a little world of their own that was nifty but that didn’t always have much to do with the business we were in while the users didn’t have the vision to see that new capabilities could make their functions easier and more efficient and effective then their time-honored procedures that were limited by obsolete systems capabilities. The only thing that helped me get this done—beyond a career-long reputation for questioning what the emperor was wearing—was that I already had my retirement papers in and it was a given I wasn’t angling for a follow-on job or promotion.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Not that corruption and greed don't sometimes rise and real problems occur as a result. But balance needs to be given. Most doctors would rather heal you than make more money. Most engineers take safety very seriously. Most clergymen are not predators.

Oh, I quite agree. I think on the whole most people are good and capable and want to do the safe and right thing, and I'm not one of those people who thinks all institutions are evil cabals dedicated to nothing but the making of filthy lucre at whatever the cost to the public. My post was really just intended to point out that whistle-blowing is rarely the clear black-and-white moral choice we tend to think it is. Very few whistle-blowers end up like Ralph Nadir. More often than not, they become pariahs, like Boisjly.

My experience was as an R&D chemist for Big Pharma, and I spent a lot of time doing experiments and collecting data that showed that our manufacturing processes were reliable and robust and in compliance with FDA guidelines. I was a bit player and way down on the totem pole, but I was the guy doing the actual experiments and observing the results that ultimately determined how these multi-million dollar drugs were made.

I can honestly say that I never saw any malfeasance in manufacturing or in product quality, or even the slightest suggestion of that. Problems were more likely to arise during process development, while we were trying to find a way to manufacture some drug on a large scale. Reactions that work in a test tube often don't work the same way when you scale them up, and you could have a project that was years and millions of $'s along might suddenly be threatened by an anomalous experiment or test result. That's where it got dicey. Since the FDA has access to all our written communications and can even make us testify about oral discussions, talking about these things even got dicey.

Projects develop a momentum of their own as I'm sure you know. It's not easy to stop them, or even to know whether you should try.