Talk:Failure is not an option

Opposite attitudes section
There is no apparent opposition between the attitude expressed by Jerry Bostick (which prompted the tagline "failure is not an option") and the attitude expressed by the flight directors, engineers, and administrators in the second block quote. I'd like to hear anyone else's opinions on this matter and how the article might be improved.

Bostick talks about how controllers and engineers responded to contingencies: "...when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution." Bostick's use of the word "option" indicates that he is talking about the choices available to Mission Control. Therefore, his use of the word "failure" is in reference to their performance of their jobs; they would never choose failure. In the case of the Apollo 13 mission, this meant that they would not resign themselves to losing the crew unless every last possible solution had been run down and they had no options left to choose from.

Tindall and Kraft talk about failure of systems and equipment, not of a mission or themselves. It should be clear that Kraft's statement that "we recognized failure, we knew it was there, we always looked for it" is a practical application of Murphy's Law; expect failure so that you're prepared for it. A perfect example of this in NASA practice would be John Aaron's initiative in learning about "SCE to Auxiliary" (see John Aaron). The definition of "failure" in this context is made even clearer by Kraft's reference to the Challenger disaster. Recall that the decision to launch the shuttle on that morning - over the concerns of engineers and contractors - was made based on the experience that the O-ring seals hadn't failed in previous launches after being exposed to temperatures below their safe limit. This is what Kraft meant when he said "Their decisions were based on success." This same critique is repeated in the Report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (V.I pg.9, "reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand why systems were not performing in accordance with requirements)," pg.181, and others).

All this to say that the concluding statement of this article, "Tindall followed this point by asserting that a person with the exact opposite attitude, one who would hide a problem '...was the worst kind of person to have around - absolute worst" is false because the attitude Tindall criticizes is not at all the opposite of "Failure is not an option". The two interviews refer to completely different kinds of failure. Furthermore, at no point does Bostick advocate hiding problems; he is describing Mission Control's response to a systems failure which has already happened.

The exact opposite attitude of "failure is not an option" would be "besides, there's nothing we can do" (see the Columbia accident again). The exact opposite of the attitude Kraft and Tindall describe would be "it won't be a problem" (present in both Challenger and Columbia).

So again, I'd like to hear the opinions of people more experienced with Wikipedia than I (this is my first edit) on how the article might be restructured for clarity and relevance. On a broader scope, this article is trying to describe a TV documentary, a book, and a popular phrase all at the same time.

108.4.106.251 (talk) 19:31, 4 March 2014 (UTC)