Still, NASA does not place the responsibility on Lockheed for the mission loss; instead, various officials at NASA have stated that NASA itself was at fault for failing to make the appropriate checks and tests that would have caught the discrepancy.
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns"
Typical bureaucratic BS.
Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.
This was during the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" era when staffing was cut and projects were being privatized and had to be done for cut rate costs. This video actually goes a lot into the details on what happened.
The US using Imperial (British) units instead of the modern Metric ones it's a bit silly. We are using powers of ten daily. You just have to shift points in the scale.
If you take a step back the bureaucratic bs is actually that certain countries did and continue to use imperial measurements and nonsensical date formats.
Similar thing happened in Georgia once busy Friday night when tons of bridge railing came smashing down onto the Interstate below. Given the traffic that time of day, it's a miracle no one was hurt, much less killed. Almost immediately the head of the DOT pleaded for the public to not blame the contractor who installed the railing. While it is important to do a root cause analysis, the DOT head should be mostly concerned about the people who could have been killed instead of the contractor. It was an incredibly tone-deaf moment.
But I didn't see anything in that description that was against serving the public. The only way to serve the public at that point in time was launching an investigation, not making super preliminary statements about what could have gone wrong and who could have been hurt.
I wouldn't say the tone deafness itself is a significant sign of corruption.
So the reason to think corruption is that there's no other reason to say that?
Well that's not true. Incorrectly blaming a particular company in the heat of the moment could lead to harm or harassment, and it's good to remind people to wait for a real investigation. The last thing the DOT wants at that point is even more avoidable mistakes.
And if it was motivated by corruption that statement seems like a bad idea. It draws a lot of attention to that specific contractor while telling people to wait for the investigation. If they are at fault, that extra attention is bad for them in the long run.
> the DOT head should be mostly concerned about the people who could have been killed instead of the contractor
You can't do anything about the past, but you can do something about the future.
The DOT head should be looking at both things. But at that point in time there's nothing they can meaningfully say about what happened except by making a serious promise to investigate. On the other end, the harm from incorrectly blaming the wrong people is something they can try to prevent.
It probably was tone-deaf but when you say their underlying concerns are wrong I disagree.
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns"
Typical bureaucratic BS. Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.