🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1993Jan7.080918.1849@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.uucp (Gary Coffman) writes:

No, NASA listened to Gary Coffman who said, "Don't be success-
oriented like the airlines, who believe one man is capable of
making a go/no-go decision on a flight.  Set up a bureaucracy
to make the decision instead." 

NASA required so many people to sign off that it was impossible
to get them all to agree at the same time.  If someone hadn't said,
"fuck this requirement," no Shuttle flight would ever have got off
the ground.  The bureacracy was so large that no one person knew 
which requirements were safe to waive and which weren't.  Yet each
flight required multiple waivers.

Somewhere along the line, someone made a mistake.  Immediately
the blame-fixers started their witch hunt.  They never bothered
to look too deeply, of course, for fear they would find themselves
looking into the mirror.  No bureaucrat is ever going to admit
that Bureaucracy itself was at fault.  Instead, they would take
the Gary Coffman approach.  If bureaucracy failed, it must be
because there wasn't enough of it.  

Meanwhile, the airlines, who are "success-oriented" because 
they must make money, rely on a single man -- the Captain -- to 
decide if an aircraft is safe to fly, based on input from a very 
small ground and flight crew.  And they fly thousands of planes 
every day, man-, woman-, and child-rated, in good and bad weather, 
with a very good safety record. 

But, by all means, let's not look at the airline model.  Because
we're about space and, as Gary tells us, Space is Different. Let's
have more bureacracy, more paperwork, and more managers involved.
Make sure every decision is made by a committee of at least eight
people because a single person might make a mistake.