And then came Challenger. The public pretty much crucified NASA...and, in my opinion, NASA has never recovered.

I never considered NASA responsible for Challenger. IIRC, the White House pressured NASA to make the launch for publicity reasons, otherwise they would have delayed for temperature reasons. And that brings up the "real" testing issue in this case..... how well did Morton-Thiokol test those O-rings for low temperature safety, and was it documented in a chart showing the failure-vs-temperature probability. From what I recall, they just relied on some engineer issuing a politically pressured guess. (Of course Morton-Thiokol might just have been a scapegoat, being small enough to blame without too much adverse corporate disrepute).

Everyone gets alot of "patriotic confusion" over the space race, and the blame game gets very distorted, since they feel failures are a reflection of God's love/hate for our country. As a matter of fact, I had a woman blame me personally for the Challenger disaster, because the night before at dinner, I was discussing whether it was even ethical to blast rockets into space. She claimed I psychically caused it by bad thoughts. Unbelievable!

And then there is the Columbia's reentry burnup.... that one that burned up over Texas. Are you telling me that they didn't have a contingency plan? They just crossed their fingers and prayed it would make it.... well it didn't. They devalued those astronaut's lifes. After that, they made a contingency plan to assuage public uproar.

Now to inject my own psycho-babble blame for those 2 disasters......they both occurred under Republican administrations....Reagan and Bush Jr., who made it a point to curtail non-military spending.

Anyways, I don't want to bash NASA in this thread about software testing, because those were hardware and political failures.

The biggest most unbelievable software blunder in space, related to poor testing, was that infamous "metric-vs-english" value for the gravitational constant which destroyed that Mar's probe a few years ago. Now that was negligence! Are you telling me, that their simulations didn't detect that gross error? A complete failure of proper software testing.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

In reply to Re^5: "Practices and Principles" to death by zentara
in thread "Practices and Principles" to death by ack

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.