"Now That's A REAL Camera!"

[Ken Nadvornick]

Regarding the successful return of the astronauts, they made it back precisely because the engineering that went into the effort worked perfectly. There was enough well thought out design and redundancy in the system that the required resources were available exactly when and where they were needed.

How many times over the course of the STS program did you turn on the evening news and hear that an earlier launch attempt had "aborted" and "failed?" Not a huge number. But occasionally it happened.

Were they failures? Absolutely not.

Ever watch the NASA cameras pointed at a shuttle just prior to launch? The computerized launch sequence logic tests each engine exhaust bell by moving it in every possible direction just prior to ignition. It's quite the beautiful ballet to watch. But if there were to be any problem whatsoever exposed by this test, the launch sequence would be halted prior to engine ignition.

A failure? Nope. Any engineer working on the program would tell you it was a successful sequence completion. The system worked exactly as designed - no engine start and no launch under those conditions. Not the expected ending, but a good ending nevertheless. A reason to celebrate. Especially for those software engineers who created the logic to do exactly that.

And so it was with Apollo 13. Why did they make it back home alive? Because it was possible for them to do so. Because even with an onboard oxygen tank explosion (preordained something like ten years earlier when the insulation on a wire was inadvertently nicked), the mission remained within its successful performance envelope. Everything needed to get home was already present in that closed system of docked command-service-lunar modules, hanging 1.25 light seconds away from Earth. Not present by accident. Present by design.

The art of engineering can often be reduced to the art of risk mitigation. It's not a dramatic excess to say that Apollo 13 truly was NASA's finest hour. To NOT bring them home alive would have been a monumental waste of the already designed, engineered, available, and paid for resources.

Regarding today's work ethic and missing sense of purpose? I absolutely could not agree with you more...

Ken

[EricO]

Once on seeing my yashica 124g someone said "Where do you put the coal"...

That is funny! This summer I took my Mamiya RZ67 out to a parade and someone asked if it was a video camera.

[Worker 11811]

I am in no way saying that bringing our men back alive was not the right thing to do. It was.

However, people at Morton-Thiokol were warned that the rubber seals on the solid boosters could fail catastrophically and they shipped the rockets anyway. NASA was warned that it this could be a problem but they accepted the rockets anyway. Richard Feynman told NASA that he thought the failure was due to poor seals in the boosters and they ignored him, too. Feynman finally held a press conference, on his own, where he demonstrated how the rubber was prone to failure and, finally, NASA came to agree with him.

People at NASA knew that ice and insulation fell from the launch towers and boosters during launch and people asked questions whether it could cause problems. Those questions were ignored and people who asked them were quietly censured. It wasn't until after the shuttle burned up that NASA accepted the fact that falling debris could cause problems on the shuttle.

When Apollo 13 exploded, an unrecognized error might have caused an unseen nick in the insulation on a wire which ignited the oxygen in the tank. When NASA engineers and scientists were posed with this theory they came right out and said, "Yes, this could be the cause." Then, in their next breath, they said, "How can we make sure it doesn't happen again?"

When I first posed this question about the space program I warned that it would be a side trip. My point is not to argue whether NASA does its job, nor is it to argue whether we should have brought our men home. I say, "Yes!" to both. NASA does a fine job.

My point was to say, as a society, there used to be a work ethic which created a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of quality workmanship which does not seem to exist today.

My example was meant to say that, even in a fine organization such as NASA, the changes in these undercurrents are visible. The video documentary on Apollo 13 which I refer to was meant to be an example of that.

[ntenny]

My point was to say, as a society, there used to be a work ethic which created a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of quality workmanship which does not seem to exist today.

I agree with most of your analysis, but I think this summary is an overgeneralisation.

The era around the Apollo missions was really NASA's finest hour; they got a lot of resources, including many of the best engineers in the world and enough resources to make sure those engineers were able to do their jobs to a very, very high standard. By the time of the shuttle, that lustre had faded a little; they were under more budget pressure and into the beginning of an era that might be summarised as "you must do more with less". That era has seen some very impressive successes too, but one of the lessons of the _Challenger_ is that "more with less" is not a good way to approach manned spaceflight.

But I think if you look elsewhere in society, to areas that draw the same kind of interest and resources as the NASA of the 1960s, you'll find similar levels of "purpose" and "quality workmanship". A good place to look might be the technical industries that eventually spawned the modern internet: the big workstation companies in the young Silicon Valley, the AI research communities around Stanford and MIT, the idea incubators of Xerox PARC and Thomas J. Watson and Bell Labs, and so on. That era too passed, as a lot of aspects of the computer business became commoditised; you can't really sell fine craftsmanship when your competitor's ugly plastic product works just as well as your beautiful handmade work of art and costs half as much.

To get back to photography, I'm not sure cameras ever really had a "golden age" of this sort. Those beautiful Weimar Republic plate cameras, the Juwells and Bergheils and the like, were accompanied by plenty of hack-job plate cameras that were a cheap black box with a triplet slapped on the front in an ugly two-speed shutter. And on the other hand, complain all you like about the modern digicam, but they're still making Hasselblads too.

As someone or other said, things aren't like they used to be, but then they never were.

-NT

[wblynch]

MBA mentality.. the virus that is bringing us all down.

[cfclark]

I agree with most of your analysis, but I think this summary is an overgeneralisation.

The era around the Apollo missions was really NASA's finest hour; they got a lot of resources, including many of the best engineers in the world and enough resources to make sure those engineers were able to do their jobs to a very, very high standard. By the time of the shuttle, that lustre had faded a little; they were under more budget pressure and into the beginning of an era that might be summarised as "you must do more with less". That era has seen some very impressive successes too, but one of the lessons of the _Challenger_ is that "more with less" is not a good way to approach manned spaceflight.

I largely agree with this, although I'd also like to add that during the Apollo era, there was a definite goal in mind (get to the moon before the Soviets and get back alive), whereas in the subsequent Shuttle era, PR seemed to "wag the dog" to a great extent and NASA, by design or not, put a happy spin on just about everything in order to justify its funding. I don't know that this directly contributed to the two catastrophic Shuttle accidents, but it didn't help. NASA did learn from each of those, and is unlikely to make the same mistakes again (it also fixed the issues involved in the Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 accidents), but the approach to QA in the design process, before the missions, is what needs to be addressed to make sure the agency doesn't need to learn from future mistakes the same way.

All in all, 17 deaths over the long history of NASA is probably not an unexpected casualty rate--it's just that they have happened in such horrific and public ways.

What this has to do with cameras, I'm not sure, exactly. But an interesting tangent.

[Worker 11811]

A generalization, it is but it illustrates the idea that I perceive a downward trend in many people's mentality toward "fastercheaperbetter" over quality and workmanship.

[CD55]

Heh, almost the same situation here - but it was my step-sister's son's first birthday. Had my Bronica ETRSi and received very similar comments. I also brought out my Hass 503cx...I don't know my family is pretty hilarious when it comes to things that they don't understand - nobody wanted to try using (or even holding, for that matter) the camera when I offered. Maybe the 1-year-old would have but I didn't ask him

The interesting part at the party I was with was my cousin, who has a Canon Rebel digital SLR, saying he really couldn't use the Bronica. I tried basically explaining to him that you just set the shutter speed and f-stop like any camera to get a picture but he said he would rather just "machine gun" his camera and that there is bound to be a good picture in there.

Nice interesting stories coming from everybody by the way!

[Ken Nadvornick]

Nice interesting stories coming from everybody by the way!

Yeah. We sorta got off track. Sorry.

Ken

[CD55]

Yeah. We sorta got off track. Sorry.

Ken

No need to be sorry Ken. Your story was interesting too.