Tim Killian writes:

It's fortunate that nobody was hurt. This reminds me of the yokels at
Lockheed who removed bolts holding a $240 million satellite to its rotating
support stand and forgot to tell anyone about it. Another crew came in the
next day and, without checking, decided to tip the stand 90 degrees -- bam!

NOAA-N-Prime. They bolted it to the adapter, but didn't notice the adapter
wasn't bolted to the turnover cart, after it'd been borrowed by the DMSP
folks. Oops.

Check out http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15189 which has the
final report. "We recommend ass beatings all around but it won't change a
thing"

"The Technician Supervisor even commented that there were empty bolt holes,
the rest of the team and the RTE in particular dismissed the comment and did
not pursue the issue further. Finally, the lead technician and the Product
Assurance (PA) inspector committed violations in signing off the TOC
verification procedure step without personally conducting or witnessing the
operation. The MIB found such violations were routinely practiced."

"The MIB finds the LMSSC system safety program to be very ineffective. Few
resources are allocated to system safety, few requirements for safety
oversight exist and little programmatic supervision was provided for the
safety representatives."

"Also, some team members were notified as late as quitting time the day before
the operation that they were to perform the next day."

Gee Golly! That's NEVER happened to me!!

-gc

--
Christmas is weird. What other time of the year do you sit in front of
a dead tree and eat candy out of your socks?
-- (alt.gothic)