[AR] failures and Apollo 6 (was Re: clusters and reliability...)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 19:29:57 -0500 (EST)
On Sat, 23 Jan 2016, Hugh Blair-Smith wrote:
Thanks, Henry et al, for these corrections! ... The excitement at KSC at
the time was all about pogo, pogo, pogo. Should have known, I suppose,
since my research into the Apollo 11 program alarms showed how accounts
by a variety of people had to be combined to get a good picture...
Yes, unfortunately, the first guesses at what went wrong don't always pan
out. A particularly notable case is the loss of Mars Observer, where the
widespread first guess, the conclusion of the investigation report, and
the two best theories for what actually happened, are all different.
(There's sort-of a common pattern between that case and this one, in fact,
of recent events biasing expectations: the MO first guess was influenced
by a prelaunch electronics failure, a few months earlier, on a satellite
using some similar hardware; the Apollo 6 pogo was an obvious possible
cause for almost any later problem on the same flight.)
One remarkable thing, and totally typical of how Apollo was conducted,
was the reaction to the most dreaded type of failure, the systemic
design flaw. ... Don't overthink it, they seem to be saying, just fix it
and carry on.
I'd guess that part of that was Apollo in general, but also part of it was
Marshall: they'd been developing one rocket after another for decades;
they'd had failures before; having a few on the Saturn V wasn't a big
surprise; this wasn't an especially bad one, so fix it and proceed; if
Houston or HQ got nervous, well, that was their problem.
In a print-on-demand world, I may be able to incorporate these facts into my
book fairly soon without going through an elaborate nth-edition procedure.
I'll certainly add you, Henry, to my acknowledgment section!
Thanks!
Henry
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