Losing Faith in "Engineer Managers"

Today, after watching two documentaries on what were possibly the worst disasters to hit space exploration, a thousand thoughts race through my mind. It has been a revelation and an eye opener for me that both the Challenger Space Shuttle (STS 51) and the Columbia Space Shuttle (STS 107) disasters occured not because of a failure in engineering but a failure in management. It will probably take me days to settle into this reality, and I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it must have been for the families of the deceased.

Never before have I felt more profoundly sorrowful for the loss of human life, and more faithless on the Engineering Managers. My heart screams denial, but the facts in front of me are simply too unequivocal. Being a die-hard engineering student, I had always thought that I ought to cut those in the management a bit more slack. I thought that I was simply too prejudiced, but, to use a cliche, my worst fears have come true.

Engineering and management do not mix.

Now the skeptics in you might not see this prudent - me taking sides based on a documentary. But this was a National Geographic series in which they stuck to the facts and kept the speculation to a minimal. As you read through, it is I who will speculate.

The Challenger Incident

On a cold Tuesday morning of January 28th 1986, hundreds of spectators gather at a Florida coast to witness the launch of the 25th Space Shuttle members. Amongst them are the family members of the seven astronauts on board. Little did they know that they were about to see their loved ones blown into a million pieces within the hour. The weather was by far the coldest of all shuttle launches. This has already delayed the launch by a week.
At 11:38 am eastern time, the shuttle lifts off the Kennedy Space Centre. Within about 65 seconds, it has cleared the "max Q" - the region of atmosphere where the forces on the shuttle are maximum. 8 seconds later, it explodes into a massive fireball, killing all astronauts on board.
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what went wrong?
The cause of the explosion was determined to be the failure of the solid rocket boosters' O-rings to expand easily, resulting in burning rocket fuel leaking out of the boosters. This severed the contact between a booster and the main fuel tank, and the booster crashed into the tank, causing millions of tons of fuel to ignite in an instant - an explosion.

While I will not elaborate more on the technical aspect of the failure - you can watch the documentary for that - what I will meditate upon is the human factor. Roger Boisjoly, an engineer with Thiokol - the company that manufactured the O-rings, had found conclusive evidence from previous shuttle launches that the O-rings fail to expand properly under extreme cold, and that this can potentially cause burning solid fuel to leak out of the solid boosters. Why, then, was the launch okayed on such a cold day? Was it because of the corporate pressure of keeping schedule, that put human life on the backseat? Boisjoly declared, under oath, to have barged into the Thiokol office on the morning of the launch insisting vehemently that they not go ahead with the launch, and that the shuttle was in grave danger in its current configuration, in this weather.

Now what I saw on that table where Boisjoly presented his findings were a bunch of so-called engineering managers. These are folks who probably have a bachelor's degree in science or engg. enough to understand what he meant. But their management caps clouded filtered the scientific facts and clouded their judgement. Unsure of what to do, they informed the senior managers up at NASA recommending a launch abort. However, the NASA guys snubbed Thiokol for pestering them right before the launch and asked them to arrive at a conclusive decision while they held the phone.

What followed rocked my heart to the core. One of the guys on the conference table where Boisjoly had just arrived decided to take a vote. Take a vote? TAKE A VOTE? The fate of seven people's lives was to be decided by simple majority??? Oh my God. I guess that guy had read about it in some of his B-school textbooks on how to handle tricky meetings - take a vote. Being a manager and not and engineer, he never appreciated the grevity of the facts and photographs lying on the table in front of him. He never appreciated the frenzy of Roger Boisjoly on how worried he was. Roger was an engineer, he knew only too well what the loss of those lives meant. But to his managers, loss of dollars and loss of promotions was probably all that mattered. Boisjoly was voted out, and so were the seven astronauts.

The managers adviced him to take off his engineering cap and put on his management cap. Only one expression comes to my mind - "What the fuck???" Didn't the management retards understand the simple truth in scientific facts, and that they were not a cap that could be taken off at will. I mean, no matter what cap you are wearing, doing anything to prevent loss of human life ought to come first, doesn't it?

Roger Boisjoly will never forget what happened in the next 20 minutes. The fact that he knew about it would have eaten him from inside. The powerlessness in front of the system that we engineers feel can do that to you. Haven't you felt like throwing your head against the wall when someone in front of you pays no heed to what you are saying? I guess that was how Roger felt. He resigned soon after, and suffered a nervous breakdown. That is the sad end met by all those who raise their voice. This is what happens when you care for your countrymen more than your job.

The NASA senior manager on the other hand, having demonstrated textbook managerial skills, was promoted to the post of Director of All Propulsion Sytems. Morton Thiokol Inc. was awarded a US$1.8 billion contract to build a new line of solid rocket boosters.

And thus, Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Judy Resnick, Ellison Onizuka, Ron McNair, Greg Jarvis and Christa were killed not by the faulty O-rings, but by system of management at NASA.



This has shown how the interaction between pure talent (science and engineering) and shrewd pennysaving (management) has not been a good one. Scientists and engineers are not meant to be handled by managers. I guess what Roger Boisjoly saw on that conference table was a bunch of managers trying to handle an overenthusiastic, exaggerating technical guy like him, probably recalling some textbook they read.

In my fucking arrogant opinion, just because managers operate like robots, based on specific instruction sets and their execution, they should not assume that the whole world should descend to their level. We do not want an intellectually rich world to be run by fools.


The Columbia Incident

On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia prepares to wrap up its thus successful mission. Little do they know that there is a gaping 25cm hole in the carbon-carbon reinforced coverings of its wings. As the crew re-enters the earth's atmosphere, the gases around the shuttle heat up more than a thousand degrees celcius , pretty routine during re-entry. What is not routine is the breach in the wing shield. The hot gases enter the wing from there and and heat up the inside, ultimately causing fracture and break- up of the Shuttle, 
somewhere over Texas.



This incident is close to my heart primarily because there was an Indian on board, and also because it happend in my life time, a time when I can vividly recall watching it on the news. It was a classic example of misplaced priorities, and wrong people in charge.

Just after the liftoff, a chunk of foam broke apart from the main fuel tank of the space shuttle. It hit the shuttle wing's leading edge at about 300 km/h relative velocity and disintegrated. Pieces of foam breaking off are not unusual.
However, due to the size of this one and its way of impact, it punched a hole 25 cm wide in the wing's insulation. The footage was analysed after launch and concern was raised on whether it jeopardised the re-entry scenario. Despite all this, the Shuttle crew was not informed about the possible damage. The rednecks at NASA did not trust the astronauts to keep their cool, probably. Astronauts- whom NASA selects after a highly competetitive selection process and who undergo years of physical and psychological training.

Although NASA knew a piece of foam had hit the orbiter, they did not know as to whether or not it had caused any serious damage. They requested high-resolution satellite imagery of the orbiter so that they could see for themselves.

They were declined.

Watch how the human life again takes the backseat. NASA wanted this mission to complete as scheduled so that the International Space Station could be completed on time. The US Sentate had threatened to cut its funding if it was not. It seems as if NASA feared that if they let the satellite images be taken, then they might reveal something fishy, which would delay the landing. So, so very childishly, they denied the permission to use the imagery. The guys who were in-charge of the denial were not scientists or engineers who understood the grave consequences, but managers. All they really cared was to keep schedule.

In a way it represents the management structure of NASA today. The real scientists and engineers - the men and women actually labouring to get this organisation going - are merely subservients of the management "bosses". The managers consider them as the "Science guys", who should do all the numbers but leave the decision making upto us. In their twisted vision of things, science is some isolated phenomenon that has nothing to do with real scenarios. If such a management hierarchy is to be retained (although I don't see why), then these managers ought to realise that the scientists and engineers are the best at what they do, and their work must not be considered in isolation.

Alas, that did not happen for Columbia. Oblivious of all what was going on, they continued with the re-entry and met their Maker later that morning.



Allow me to raise one last pertinent question in my mind. Had the satellite imagery been allowed and the breach disovered, could Columbia be saved? or more importantly, would it? Would the present government, sucked up by the managers, have done all in its power to save the astronauts? Would we have seen heroes out of this mission like we saw in Apollo 13??
Or would NASA have chosen to simply ignore the problem, or have some bunch of white collar executives vote on whether or not the astronauts lives were worth more than the money it would take to rescue them???

I leave you at that...