Hackaday: The NASA workmanship standards are absolutely beautiful. I mean that in the fullest extent of the word. If I had any say in the art that goes up in the Louvre, I’d put them up right beside Mona. They’re a model of what a standard should be. A clear instruction for construction, design, and inspection all at once. They’re written in clear language and contain all the vernacular one needs to interpret them. They’re unassuming. The illustrations are perfectly communicative. It’s a monument to the engineer’s art.
3 comments:
Standardizing workmanship makes absolute sense when regarding NASA. The level and import and scale upon which NASA projects could go wrong is immense, and the detail required by the workmanship standards ensure that parts function together though designed separately. In a way, the workmanship standards are a thing of beauty, a created common language with which various departments may effectively and precisely communicate. This kind of shared plane upon which NASA can create is something most companies and industries should strive to emulate. The kind of efficiency and accuracy this allows has the potential to be staggering. I wonder, however, how long it took NASA to set these standards, and to decide what exactly should be standardized. Though theater is not rocket science, a set or show element can often be dangerous enough if improperly executed or utilized to end the life of a company member. I firmly believe work standards like these should be instituted more widely, in order to level expectations and prevent miscommunications, while bolstering accuracy and efficiency.
While doing cables for Todd in stagecraft II it sometimes seemed like we were being held to NASA level workmanship standards. Now I see that that was a woeful exaggeration but the value of these standards remains, frustratingly overkill though they may seem. We’ve all tried setting up something technological, from a sound system, to a computer, to a lighting rig only to find when you try to turn it on something doesn’t work. Often the cables are the first point to fail, because of mediocre workmanship or just pure abuse. On a rocket, this may be instant mission failure in the order of millions of dollars. In theatre we have a little more breathing room but it is nonetheless quite frustrating to deal with these failures. In that light I understand why each little cable needs to be heatshrinked inside a larger heatshrink shell.
I remember learning, maybe from NPR, that NASA also calculates the percent failure for each individual part. I believe there was also a second stat for bad weather conditions. When something went dramatically wrong, the public could point to the open NASA documents and be outraged that they knew that there was a change that it would fail, and they continued anyway. In reality, they had a certain number, (I forget it at this point, maybe 15% chance of failure), and anything below that was good. It was actually a testament to their careful diligence that they understood potential issues, and that part of reducing accidents was acknowledging that everything could potentially go wrong.
I’m glad that the author of this article didn’t actually make his coworkers read his NASA inspired explanation, but I hope that it helped him clarify his instructions and confirm that he had chosen the best practices and materials for the task. As long as someone is thinking it through fully, not everyone has to check the justification.
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