-=> JEAN PARROT wrote to JASEN BETTS <=-

 JP>       Hello, Jasen, it is a great day here.

 JB> Maybe you mean the mars explorer spacecraft?, kilometers and miles
 JB> were confused, and it crashed on mars.

 JP>         I do not recall it being that gross but if you will agree that
 JP>         metric and/or inch measurements were not properly
"tranlated",
 JP>         then ok.

 JP>         We are all humans !

It was yards and meters that were confused.
One group was working in yards and another metric meters, the conversion
never took place and the spacecrasft did precisely what it was
told to do which was impact Mars rather than intended orbit.
NASA engineers are running up a rather bad score of late.
Since when was a potential lovc incident not worth reporting to superiors?
An engineer warned about Challenger but he was with Morton Thiokol
until fired shortly after that loss.
We now find the Columbia scenerio was described a day before
it happened but the word was never passed along.
And how in the world did engineers come up with an overpressure
pure oxegen test at sea level where the door couldn't be
opened and an electrically charged environment where the slightest
spark could lead to an inferno where aluminum would be burning?
Apollo 1, Grissom, Chafee and White.
Seems the human element is failing every time with the fault on the
ground rather than with the pilots.
Even the non-fatal Apollo 13 near miss was a part spec'ed to run at half
the voltage it was supplied in one of the oxygen tanks
Naybe they should fly one engineer from the program on the shuttle
on a rotation basis just to inspire them to do a better job of
thinking things through and speaking up?
 
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