Roger Boisjoly, whose prophetic warnings about the deadly defects of the Challenger space shuttle were ignored by NASA, shares his thoughts about the current state of NASA’s management.
Hi Joe:
Well the idiots that continue their attempt to manage NASA by sticking their heads in the sand when it concerns Flight Safety have been caught once more by the infamous Mr. Murphy of the very well known “Murphy’s Law” – simply stated as, what can go wrong will go wrong. There isn’t an engineer worth his/her salt that doesn’t know that to fool around and tempt Murphy’s Law is a losing proposition and that Murphy will always eventually prevail and often with the least expected timing.
What managers continually fail to recognize and/or accept is the fact that there will be a product failure of any defectively designed/manufactured or tested item sometime during the lifetime of the products use. Also, highly recognized by engineers is the FACT that Murphy’s Law can be anywhere along the spectrum path of useful life of a product from the very First Use up to the Last Use.
This has been seen over and over again in every field of engineering after known/suspected defects were allowed to be ignored by Blind Loyal Managers in favor of Massive Profits that definitely enhance the corporate bottom line. In a less known fashion, defects help fill the financial pockets of many managers who turn a blind eye to defective products to receive higher bonuses.
In total fairness to most NASA managers below the top line managers, I do not think that these lower level managers who are actually working for the government receive annual bonuses, but I’m not sure of this. However, I am absolutely certain in industry that all managers, even down to first level managers, participate in management bonus programs based upon the principle of the higher the earning, the higher the bonus pool of money to be distributed, with the managers at the top getting the lion’s share of the bonus pool.
It will be very interesting to learn if NASA will actually perform a damage assessment this time, from either space or from the ground, because they were highly criticized for not approving such a damage assessment for Columbia. We all know that if that assessment had been done, NASA would have had much better damage assessment available to them as opposed to the outright guess work that they engaged in prior to the re-entry of Columbia.
It not only makes me sad but also very angry because I now know that every attempt I made to personally expose the truth about what actually happened to Challenger, to prevent such bad management decisions from ever being made by discounting flight safety again, was all for nothing.
NASA is now so broken and devoid of management capability that congress should now act upon my early 1990′s testimony to the House Science and Space Technology Committee that strongly recommended that NASA be disbanded as an agency because they had lost all effectiveness in their capability to manage all programs, especially the Shuttle. Even though the current NASA Administrator is an engineer he obviously doesn’t have what it takes when it comes to making tough but proper technical decisions concerning Flight Safety.
Your friend,
Roger
