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Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by WalterBright on Friday June 21, 2024 @01:33PM (#40751816)
> No body was jailed for gross negligence

Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions, and when you do, you may find they're not the right people for the job.

Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.

It will also mean that people will desperately cover up mistakes rather than being open about it, meaning the mistakes do not get corrected. We see this in play where manufacturers won't fix problems because fixing a problem is an admission of liability for the consequences of those problems, and punishment.

Even the best, most conscientious people make mistakes. Jailing them is not going to be helpful, it will just make things worse.

Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by Calamitous on Friday June 21, 2024 @03:37PM (#40752896)
> Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.

That’s what responsibility is: taking lumps for making mistakes.

If I make a mistake on the road and end up killing someone, I can absolutely be held liable for manslaughter.

I don’t know if jail time is the right answer, but there absolutely needs to be some accountability.

Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by WalterBright on Friday June 21, 2024 @05:37PM (#40754082)
Have you ever made a mistake on the road that luckily did not result in anyone getting killed?

During WW2, a B-19 crash landed in the Soviet Union. The B-29's technology was light-years ahead of Soviet engineering. Stalin demanded that an exact replica of the B-29 be built. And that's what the engineers did. They were so terrified of Stalin that they carefully duplicated the battle damage on the original.

Be careful what you wish for when advocating criminal punishment.

Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by int_19h on Saturday June 22, 2024 @02:26AM (#40756828)
Tu-4 was indeed a very close copy of B-29, but no, they did not "carefully duplicate the battle damage" on the original. The one prominent example of copying unnecessary things that is usually showcased in this instance is a mistakenly drilled rivet hole in one of the wings that was carefully reproduced thereafter despite there not being any evident purpose for it.

That said, even then Tu-4 wasn't a carbon copy. Because US used imperial units for everything, Soviets simply couldn't make it a carbon copy because they could not e.g. source plating and wire of the exact right size. So they replaced it with the nearest metric equivalents that were available, erring on the side of making things thicker, to ensure structural integrity - which also made it a little bit heavier than the original. Even bigger changes were made - for example, Tupolev insisted on using existing Soviet engines (!), weapons, and radios in lieu of copying the American ones. It should be noted that Stalin really did want a carbon copy originally, and Tupolev had to fight his way on each one of those decisions.

Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by Anotheroneagain on Friday June 21, 2024 @01:50PM (#40751981)
Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions,

Why do you think you want it? You don't want it.

Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by LorenPechtel on Friday June 21, 2024 @07:11PM (#40754793)
We should not blame people for honest mistakes. Challenger was not an honest mistake, it was political pressure overriding engineering. The joints were not supposed to leak at all, yet they were leaking every time and it was being swept under the rug. When someone suddenly demands to get it in writing when it was normally a verbal procedure they *know* there's a problem. That's not a mistake.

Same as the insulation damage to the tiles kept being ignored until Columbia barely survived. And then they fixed the part they blamed for that incident, but the tiles kept coming back damaged.

And look at what else was going wrong that day--the boosters would most likely have been lost at sea if the launch had worked.