The Starliner drama has been a major setback for Boeing’s space ambitions, adding to years of struggle to get the capsule off the ground and keep up with rival company SpaceX.
Engineering leaders have to work as bullshit detectors. People aren’t even necessarily trying to lie, they just built up an unconscious tower of their own ego and it’s hard to step back far enough to get them to realize that maybe the surefire solution they are emotionally invested in that’s theirs is actually super-sketch. Presumably there’s a bunch of people on the Boeing team working thrusters who were totally convinced that they understood it well enough, the simulations all showed it was fine, etc.
But you can’t, as a leader, inspect everything in deep detail. So you have to have a shortcut, which is you detect bullshit.
Boeing triggered the bullshit detector. (Or, depending on how you see things, “Boeing finally triggered the bullshit detector”) And once you’ve triggered the bullshit detector, now everything’s going to be checked for bullshit.
Engineering leaders have to work as bullshit detectors. People aren’t even necessarily trying to lie, they just built up an unconscious tower of their own ego and it’s hard to step back far enough to get them to realize that maybe the surefire solution they are emotionally invested in that’s theirs is actually super-sketch. Presumably there’s a bunch of people on the Boeing team working thrusters who were totally convinced that they understood it well enough, the simulations all showed it was fine, etc.
But you can’t, as a leader, inspect everything in deep detail. So you have to have a shortcut, which is you detect bullshit.
Boeing triggered the bullshit detector. (Or, depending on how you see things, “Boeing finally triggered the bullshit detector”) And once you’ve triggered the bullshit detector, now everything’s going to be checked for bullshit.
You would think, after Challenger and Columbia, that NASA would have a lower threshold for these things as well.