The Space Shuttle's Lessons For The Future
“You start out with a new program that requires you to establish this amount of margin, but those margins are never enough,” says John Thomas, who managed the redesign of the solid-fuel boosters for NASA after Challenger. “As the program progresses, you run into difficulties in design, manufacturing or unknown environments, or coupling of loads, and you start reducing those margins. Pretty soon we’re flying without a robust system, and that has been the case with every system that I know of that has been designed in the past. If we were to design on the front end, as aggressive as it might be at the time, to build in some unusual margins, and then make performance commensurate with that robustness, then you don’t run into these problems.”
“Mr. Goetz told me to know the product very well, know what you’re doing, know what you’re building, be intimately familiar with what you’re doing, because in the liquid rocket business it can go bad in a hurry,” Kynard says. “He said the hardware knows the truth; you need to get to know the hardware. He also said once you feel comfortable that you have the information, don’t be afraid to make a decision. You’ve got to get on with it. You still have a job to do.”
