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The Space Shuttle: A $200 Billion Lesson in Risk Management (Patreon)

Published:
2024-05-21 11:06:06
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Honestly, this is really a video about the Challenger disaster. It's something I've been wanting to talk about for years. But I also go into detail on some other 'channel favourites', such as the RS-25 and the Shuttle's avionics system. This is all to build a picture of how risky technology got ahead of NASA's ability to adequately manage it.

This is a bit of a 'big topic' for this channel. But, I've limited myself to a few specifics and gone into detail on those. Hope you all enjoy it!

As always, you won't miss out anything by watching this here before I release it on youtube in a couple of days. I may include a fancier animation for the RS-25 section in the general release video. But (unless anyone spots a mistake) the script will be identical.

Comments

Felix Argyle

New video! I got a nice cup of tea and some bikkies to nibble on.

Felix Argyle
>>138591706

Just finished the video and yeah... I never knew the more nuanced reality behind the culture that lead to the Challenger disaster or how those issues were always present. Pretty remarkable to think that only two major disasters occurred, I guess that is a reflection of the quality of the engineers and the skill of ground crews who all took this seriously.

Alexander the ok
>>138591706

I think most major disasters have a great deal of nuance that we don't see through everyday reporting. Even in cases where there has been a clear erosion of good safety principles to chase profit (think Boeing), sometimes it's always good to ask 'yes, but why would someone sign off on something they thought would fail if it meant they would lose their job and potentially end up in jail?' The Shuttle team made the best of an incredibly demanding set of requirements. They did come incredibly close to losing 2 other missions though. STS-51F was saved by a quick thinking ground controller. STS-27 made it back through luck. Come to think of it, STS-93 was a close call too...

Jacob Rohde

I've just watched the new video and i loved it. I have never heard or thought from that angle about the shuttle. I always was interested in space and space fering and I can't wait for the buran video.

Alexander the ok
>>138714188

Thanks. Yep, the Shuttle is such a complex topic, it's really difficult to do a single video on it, which I why I chose to limit myself to the 'organisational safety' angle in this video.

bendfv

Really enjoyed this, you won my patronage. But I do disagree, I believe we should have never dropped the Saturn V and should have stayed with launching and updating the Saturn family of rockets. My belief was started when I read the 2007 article by Mike Griffin where he lays out how the Saturn V ended up costing half as much as the space shuttle per ton to orbit and with beyond LEO capabilities would have ment we would have had a moon base and been to Mars by now. I would really like a video going over that either validating Mike's thesis or disproven it with evidence.

Alexander the ok
>>138813899

Thanks very much. Yes I think I may have accidentally presented a false dichotomy there - a Saturn derivative could have been a viable alternative. It’s really difficult to speculate how that would look and how it would have fared in reality. We have to remember, the shuttle was sold on the promise of being SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than Saturn. With hindsight we know it failed at that task. Back in 1970, I’m not sure NASA would be able to get the budget to continue flying and developing Saturn.

bendfv
>>138813899

Mike Griffin argued otherwise: "This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure." - https://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html