Bruce Gagnon opines on something about which he apparently has zero knowledge. I know...shocka...but in this case he seems to have pegged the cluelessness meter and bent the needle:

The shuttle is grounded again.

Not quite -- the launch has been delayed due to a sensor glitch. Grounding more accurately describes the status it was in from Feb. 1, 2003 until a couple of weeks back, prior to Dr. Griffin announcing the RTF launch would take place on July 16th.

Some years ago NASA privatized all shuttle maintenance operations and told the aerospace corporations who got the contracts to maintain the shuttle that they could keep any profits they squeezed from the operation. The corporations began laying off maintenance crews and increased the pressure and workloads on those remaining workers.

Which workers would those be, Mr. Gagnon? Surely you're not shedding tears over the careers of folks whose involvement with the von Braun-tainted US space program marks them as Nazis? Or are these folks only Nazis when you want to call into question the moral basis of the space program, but convenient heroic proletarians injured by unconscionable capitalist greed when you want to take a swipe at the Military-Industrial Complex™?

Could it be the constant problems with the shuttle are now in part as a result of this "profits first" and safety second mentality of the aerospace industry? I think so.

Well, you can think whatever you like, but that particular opinion is entirely at odds with reality.

Mr. Gagnon has clearly never spent time at one of the contractor sites, with their safety reminder posters on every wall, frequent safety briefings and standdowns, etc. The magic words "safety issue" are not infrequently used to obtain additional funding from NASA for this or that specific safety-related improvement. In my own experience, safety is something of an obsession (albeit a healthy one) in the aerospace industry, which is why when safety incidents do occur they are regarded as an unconscionable embarrassment for the entire company (which, I should point out, gave up its filthy, evil, capitalist profits on the project as penance).

As one of the commenters at his site point out, the "constant problems" with the Shuttle are inherent in the fact that it is a highly complex system based on thirty-year-old technology. Think of the Shuttles as a set of high-performance sportscars, hand-built from scratch. Now think of the maintenance and reliability problems one runs into after five or six years with a mass-produced car, where scale and long production runs not enjoyed by those hand-built vehicles permit design problems and maintenance issues revealed by experience in use to be reduced or eliminated over time.

But actually looking at what the problem is and the reasons it is cropping up now might argue against his socialist premise -- the reality of the situation doesn't matter if he can twist it in some way to fit his government good, industry bad worldview. And this is where the needle on the cluelessness meter gets bent.

Looking back at the reason the fleet was grounded (for real) for two-plus years, the CAIB Report clearly established that the organization directly responsible for the accident was none other than NASA itself -- not its contractors. It was at NASA, and not at USA or the other contractors, where safety took a backseat to schedule pressures. It was NASA (aka "the government") that chose to ignore the advice of its contractor (aka "the Military-Industrial Complex™") and treat the ET foam-shedding problems as a maintenance issue rather than a safety problem. And it was NASA that was obsessed with meeting the ISS schedule to avoid threatened budget cuts, fostering a "safety second" mentality.

So, is Mr. Gagnon correct in his assessment of this delay and his pinning of the problems with the Shuttle program exclusively on the greedy capitalists of the Military-Industrial Complex™ throwing safety to the wind in an unscrupled scramble for profits-over-people? I think not.

Posted by T.L. James on July 16, 2005 01:17 PM