Comment by gus_massa
4 days ago
There is also an old article written by a professional bongo player about the Challenger explossion. He has other hobbies, but he was not a Rocket Scientist https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
The takeaway, is that the software was fine, but other systems like the main engine used too much cutting edge technology and have a lot of unexpected failure modes and too many problems like partialy broken parts that should no get partialy broken. [For a weird coincidence, Artemis II uses the same engines.] He concluded that when you consider all the possible problems the failure rate was closer to 1/100, but management was underestimating them and the official value that was 1/100000. [Anyway, the engines didn't fail in Columbia, it was one of the other possible problems.]
The articles explain that the shield has problems but management is underestimating them again. Let's hope the mission goes fine, but in case of a explosion it would be like a deja vu.
Calling Richard Feynman a “professional bongo player” is hardly an honest description. He was a Nobel prize winning physics professor renowned for his problem-solving abilities. He was certainly qualified to analyze the Challenger explosion.
Anyone can write an article when the hindsight is 20-20. You can make all sorts of justifications about what happened.
Much different than predicting future.
The in the article I linked has a lot of other qualifications. Someone wrote a comment complaining about my misscharacterization, but deleted it before I could say sorry. Sorry for the joke!
If you have 2 or 3 spare hours, it's worth reading.
The guy got a lot of first hand information about the Challenger disaster. He analyzed not only what went wrong, that is in the 20-20 category, but also what could have gone wrong, that is in the speculation category.
But if you read that report after the Columbia disaster, it's almost a premonition. He didn't identify the exact problem that caused the explosion, but the decisions that made that posible were quite similar.