Disasters of politics and technology
By 
40 years ago this morning, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated a little more than a minute into its flight.. Old man thought: The time that has passed since then is almost exactly the same as the time between that morning and the end of World War II, which at the time (I was 26) seemed like an event from an immeasurably distant past.
In the years since, I’ve had more than one occasion to reference this passage from Richard Feynman’s classic analysis of the politics of engineering that led to that spectacular disaster:
An estimate of the reliability of solid rockets was made by the range safety officer, by studying the experience of all previous rocket flights. Out of a total of nearly 2,900 flights, 121 failed (1 in 25). This includes, however, what may be called, early errors, rockets flown for the first few times in which design errors are discovered and fixed. A more reasonable figure for the mature rockets might be 1 in 50. With special care in the selection of parts and in inspection, a figure of below 1 in 100 might be achieved but 1 in 1,000 is probably not attainable with today’s technology. (Since there are two rockets on the Shuttle, these rocket failure rates must be doubled to get Shuttle failure rates from Solid Rocket Booster failure.)
NASA officials argue that the figure is much lower. They point out that these figures are for unmanned rockets but since the Shuttle is a manned vehicle “the probability of mission success is necessarily very close to 1.0.” It is not very clear what this phrase means. Does it mean it is close to 1 or that it ought to be close to 1?
This type of logic is everywhere, and is especially prevalent among elite decision makers in various contexts. Essentially it goes:
(a) To do X seems on its face crazy, irresponsible, reckless, evil etc.
(b). We are not crazy, irresponsible, reckless, evil, etc. people, but rather the opposite of that, because look at our resumes, degrees, awards, h-factors, titles, salaries, and so forth.
(c) Therefore what seems to be the case to naive opinion in re (a) is not in fact the case.
For a particularly striking example of this sort of mental tendency, consider that this was pretty much the template for all elite media coverage of the initial election of Donald Trump as president for quite a long time afterwards. Indeed you could still find many people taking essentially this same view of things last January. Yes on its face this looks like a massive political, cultural, and institutional failure, but that’s only because you don’t understand The Guardrails, The Secret Inherent Strength of the System, The Sometimes Obscure Yet Ultimately Unimpeachable Wisdom of the Market, the Esoteric Workings of the Meritocracy that Has Put the Best People in the Most Important Positions, and so forth and so on.
Continuing this cheerful analogy, apply the following passage to American political history since oh I don’t know, the pardon of Richard Nixon? The election of Ronald Reagan? Bush v. Gore? The invasion of Iraq? So very many analogies to choose from!
The history of the certification and Flight Readiness Reviews will not be repeated here. (See other part of Commission reports.) The phenomenon of accepting for flight, seals that had shown erosion and blow-by in previous flights, is very clear. The Challenger flight is an excellent example. There are several references to flights that had gone before. The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood. They did not occur equally on all flights and all joints; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, still more leading to catastrophe?
12 months ago, the flight managers were still pretty sure that those O-rings were more or less OK, all things considered. And after all, what were the alternatives, besides continuing to pretend that any of this made any sense, and that somehow or the other everything would work out in the end?