"Shuttle a deathtrap, says astronaut" (Headline in Britain's Observer newspaper)

More evidence of the dicatorship culture at NASA:

In today's Observer newspaper, veteran astranaut Mike Mullane was quoted as saying that "Only janitors and cafeteria workers at Nasa were blameless in the deaths of the Challenger seven. Columbia was a repeat of Challenger, where people had a known design problem and launched anyway."

Why was this? Again, the answer is scarily mundane. Mullane said, "It's not like other jobs, where if you get frustrated you can go in to your boss and say "Shove it!" You can't do that at Nasa because there's no other place to go fly shuttles."

Think about it: employees are too scared to tell the truth to their bosses, because they won't be able to find another job!

Forgive me for sounding naive, but I thought NASA would make sure its employees don't have to worry about mundane things like job security, because they should be worrying about things like mission safety. Instead, it's horrifying to know that NASA employees feel that their jobs are on the line if they speak the truth!

You can read the full Observer article at
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1692139,00.html

(Please send your comments to me at cvdhruve@gmail.com)