A Different Kind of Job

At T-6 seconds your world begins to shake as the engines ignite. The rumbling grows louder and stronger until the countdown strikes zero; liftoff! You become pinned to your seat and unable to move as you accelerate fast. Slamming through the atmosphere at nearly double the speed of sound, what are you thinking? You might think of your family or friends; others might think about the engineer that looked a bit too worried this morning. Regardless of how worried they might have looked, you continued on with the mission nevertheless. There is no denying that space travel is enormously risky and potentially life threatening. The danger associated with putting humans in space introduces complex relationships between those who engineer the rocket despite the risk and the astronauts who willingly take the journey despite the danger. This relationship is not unique to the aerospace industry, however. In our everyday lives we interact with countless structures and machines engineered by individuals we whom we will probably never interact. What happens when the engineering isn't so sound? While the effect on the user might be obvious, we often don’t question the effect mistakes can have on the engineer themselves.

The relationship between engineers and the people who use their creations is a unique one; an unspoken yet undeniable trust forms the basis of an uncommon interpersonal relationship. We feel this trust every day; few drivers inspect their vehicles every time they drive. Collectively, we understand that the engineers have done their part to create a safe product. It is uncommon to wonder if the engineer who designed the bridge, which is holding you and your family hundreds of feet above a raging river, actually knew what he or she was doing. The trust we hold in these unnamed creators is staggering; this relationship is something we only question when things go wrong, and it's easy to see why. When things fail, they often fail epicly; it is easy to point the blame at the designers for not doing their due diligence, but we seldom ask what happens to the engineer when, despite preparation, things don't work out.

An excellent example of this is the Challenger disaster.  On January 28, 1986, seven astronauts lost their lives in a televised explosion high above the atmosphere. Most people’s immediate instinct is to point blame at the engineers; they were the ones who created the rocket, why didn’t they take more precautions? The Challenger disaster is unique in that further investigation revealed that it wasn't an engineering issue at all, it was a bureaucratic one (2). Colder than expected weather on the day of the launch meant that special rubberized gaskets used to seal in the propellant wouldn't seal properly, and the engineers at NASA knew this. One ex-NASA engineer in particular,  Bob Ebeling, still regrets the event more than thirty years later . It’s going to blow up”, Ebeling painfully confessed to his wife the night before lift off (1). Despite the best efforts of a small coalition of engineers against the launch, NASA leadership refused to delay for monetary reasons. 

While it is clear that Ebeling is not to blame, he still considers himself a loser, a failure, and refers to himself as “one of the mistakes that God made” . This is just one example of the painful and undoocumented realities of engineering. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, our creations are misused, mismanaged,  or misunderstood. While the effects on the user might be obvious, engineers are left with a lasting feeling that they could have done more. This is no different than people dying in car accidents; sometimes all of the precautions taken aren't enough to protect reckless drivers or drivers who don't use their vehicles the way they were intended. Similarly, the perfect combination of weight, wind, and vibrations can send a bridge tumbling despite state of the art preventative measures. The mental health of engineers is seldom considered; to add insult to injury, engineers in charge of products that fail lose their jobs to protect the reputation of the company. The relationship between user and engineer is an important one; it affects each of us every day. More often than not, we don’t consider the full story. Our actions and the actions of others can have painful and lasting effects on those devoted to helping us, sometimes we give engineers too much credit.

References

1) NPR.org. “30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself.” Accessed February 6, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself.

2) “CHALLENGER EXPLOSION.” Accessed February 6, 2020. https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/explode.html.