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Comment by oldgradstudent | Hacker News Reader

Science journalism is where this quote is most important for practitioners to internalize.

> Successful launch of a shuttle

Investigative journalism on NASA ignoring problems prior to the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have prevented both disasters.

> Breakthrough in physics

Investigative reporting around, for example, BICEP2 instead of just spell checking the press releases would have easily exposed the fiasco.

> Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history

So many artifacts were later turned out to be frauds, and even the ones that aren't outright fraud are often way over-interpreted.

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Oh, the irresponsibility of journalists with respect to the Shuttle runs far deeper than that. They largely acted as cheerleaders for a program that made very little sense. They largely didn't ask the hard questions about whether the Shuttle was worth doing at all (spoiler: it wasn't.)

> spoiler: it wasn't.

Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.

> Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.

It could, and it was.

http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...

Huh. Touche.

And it was known as early as the 1960s that expendable launch vehicles could be reduced in cost by as much as a factor of 10 by adopting a minimum cost rather than maximum performance design methodology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster

http://www.quarkweb.com/foyle/MinimumCostDesign.pdf

Easterbrook again was pointing this out, in the August 17, 1987 Newsweek.

The question was being asked early. It came into public focus even before the Challenger loss, as the shuttle program struggled to come remotely close to promised flight rates (which of course it never did). The cover story of the November 1985 issue of Discover magazine had this cover blurb:

"The shuttle is a superb technological achievement, and it's flown by brave, immensely competent men and women...

But what's it good for?"

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oFwAAOSwgDZjI0Av/s-l500.jpg

The article was pointing out that going with cheaper expendable launchers would have been a much, MUCH better idea. And so it proved.

(This article is one of the reasons I wrote "largely" in the comment above.)

At any point after this article came out, cheerleading was irresponsible.

Journalists might be forgiven for not predicting how uneconomic the Shuttle would be to operate, at least before this became painfully obvious a few years in. Even the critics on Capitol Hill like Mondale and Proxmire missed that; they focused more on development cost. But the Shuttle would have been a failure even if the development cost was zero.

The entire Shuttle program was worth it just for Hubble, in my opinion. It's hard to understate the effects on cosmology that piece of kit has had. Truly a Plato's Cave moment.

If it were up to me, I'd launch seven Hubble replacements named after each of the astronauts lost in Columbia.

Hubble could have been done without the Shuttle, and for a small fraction of the > $200B cost of the entire Shuttle program. This is true even if multiple Hubbles would have had to have been launched in lieu of repair missions (and making a series of them would have accrued considerable economic benefit from economies of scale and experience.)

>Investigative journalism on NASA ignoring problems prior to the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have prevented both disasters.

I think this suffers from hindsight bias. For every catastrophic o-ring or foam shedding there are hundreds or thousands of other low-probability events that people were “sure” would cause problems but never did.

The difficulty isn’t in identifying possible issues as much as assigning each a credible risk.

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