Hacker News Reader

Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

If NASA did indeed change anything, then I'd suspect it would have been the astronaut selection process. More precise: to select astronauts who can work 16 hours a day for 85 days.

Not that I side with this view, but I can empathize with it. You're spending billions of dollars on these experiments, so given the choice of either (a) doing less experiments or (b) finding three people who can work Gulag-hours, I'd expect the decision to go (b).

These are extraordinary jobs in extraordinary circumstances. You can't just apply ordinary rules.

View on HN

I agree that we sometimes need to (voluntatily) commit to extreme conditions to get big things done, but I don't think selecting for commitment can fix another problem: no plan is perfect, and they tend to get worse as the planner is separated in time and space from the action.

On Earth, we make sure command structures are hierarchically self similar and afford some tactical autonomy to people in the field, even when we are asking them to put themselves in a lot of danger. Sounds like NASA was (is?) still working out what the level of autonomy and negotiation should be.

Suppose nobody can work the schedule these guys were expected to follow? Or nobody completely new to space travel, as they were? Or suppose other skills vital to the mission are on a different axis from the ability to work the extreme hours and a compromise needs to be made between them? What then?

> Suppose nobody can work the schedule these guys were expected to follow?

The article says "the all-rookie astronaut crew had problems adjusting to the same workload level as their predecessors". So apparently the previous Skylab crews had been able to work the schedule that this crew was expected to follow.

Wikipedia tells us that on Skylab 3 a total of 1,084.7 astronaut-utilization hours were tallied by the Skylab 3 crew and that a total of 6,051 astronaut-utilization hours were tallied by Skylab 4 astronauts.

So it's fair to say that either NASA completely changed the way they measured "astronaut utilization" between these missions, or the Skylab 4 guys were flying a very different mission. We're comparing a 60 day mission to an 80 day mission, but still.

If you can’t satisfy all of your criteria, then you have to compromise on some of the criteria. But if you can, then you don’t.

Surely the goal is to maximise output not effort?

People tend to confuse the two…

No they have changed things quite a bit. They still work pretty long full days but scheduling is careful to provide enough time for each activity instead of jamming everything in back to back to back like they did that lead up to the Skylab 4 protest.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-daily-schedule-in-th...

Sure you can. We're still ethical reasoning humans at the end of the day.

Why not also select for astronauts who don't need expenditure bulky spacesuits, or astronauts who can get to space without burning so much fuel?

They should send flat racing jockeys They'd be able to launch 50% more people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com