And now Patrick, the
admitted non-engineer, tries to wade into the highly demanding profession of forensic engineering. Patrick, does it ever occur to you that the topics you dabble in are those that some of us have practiced for a living, for decades, after an initial decade or more of rigorous training and licensing?
No one knew untill the astronauts "returned " from cislunar space that an O2 tank, or cryogenic tank explosion of any sort, was responsible for the Apollo 13 staged disaster.
False. Confirmation that the tank itself had been the root cause of its own failure, rather than the victim of an external damage source, did not come until later. Knowledge that the tank had likely been irrepairably damaged was readily available approximately 45 minutes into the incident and appropriately drove the incident response at that time. You certainly don't know how to read forensic engineering reports.
It was not not not until the astronauts returned from their feigned mission that such a determination was made.
False. It was not determined until after the mission that the root cause of the tank failure was in the tank itself. The tank still failed, and there was plenty of evidence of that failure point during the mission.
Your layman's interpretation is simplistic, inaccurate, and incorrect. And that is my professional opinion.
As a consequence, one may conclude with unmitigated metaphysical certainty
Nonsense words.
...some of the story's principals including Flight Director Gene Kranz himself
...whom you are terrified to approach in person...
Kranz had foreknowledge of an INTERNAL cryogenic tank explosion, and so as surprising as it may be to some, one may confirm Kranz's perpetrator status with utter confidence.
Then accuse Kranz of it directly! Claim your well-deserved reward and ascend to the throne of Greatest Apollo Historian of All Time. Hurry up, before he passes on. Send me your contact information and I will expedite a request for a meeting with his office. What are you waiting for? You have incontrovertible proof, right? You have a golden opportunity in the form of someone who is both willing and able to facilitate such a summit. Face him, and let him face his accuser directly. Put your money where your mouth is.
No, instead you've shifted the goalposts again. You've deftly inserted the "internal" qualifier into your latest summary twist of Kranz' publications, although it was not part of the discussion until you read the Kluger passage. Now you're trying to morph your claim so that it appears to stand in direct contradiction to Kluger, regardless of what Kranz may have actually said or believed.
The retrospective sources you cite are retrospective. You don't get to backfill their present-day omniscience into what happened 40 years ago. And you have yet to answer the other examples of historical omniscience that contradict your interpretation. In fact, Gene Kranz describes the tank failure three times across two pages of the relevant chapter. You've chosen to focus only on one of them. In the paragraph prior to that, Kranz writes that something had "taken out" their cryogenics. He writes here as if the cryogenic system was the
subject of some occurrence, not the agent of it. You seem fond of reading mountains of meaning into dissections of Kranz' writings, so how did you miss that one?
The contemporary sources you cite are one hundred percent in support of an evolving understanding of the accident, a process that continues in fact until the present day. In 2012 I'm still writing articles and classes on how to train operators to think better and how to engineer machines that introspect better, using Apollo 13 as an example.
You clearly have no experience in forensice engineering or any kind of forensic or investigative science. The operators of a space mission are tasked with responding to indications of failure. We know that those indications, at all stages of action, will be incomplete and contradictory. Nevertheless we entrust operators to follow defensible lines of reasoning and inquiry and take appropriate action in the face of that uncertainty.
The first rule when faced with confusion is -- do nothing. That is, if you don't have evidence that suggests a response, don't change the course of the system unless failure is otherwise certain. The system may yet provide you with additional time-coherent information that is free from the new effects of your meddling.
Then you employ various methods of criticality analysis based on your understanding of the need the system is trying to fulfill, the consequences of proposed actions, the consequences of inaction, and the urgency suggested by the level of coupling in the system. Based on the state of the art at that time, the Mission Control team did an acceptable job of analysis.
At the 15-minute mark they were finally able to integrate enough information to understand that they had a loss of cryogenic function. By the 45-minute mark they had exhausted their immediately available options for correcting the loss within the criticality envelope. Hence the effort shifted to correcting the criticality consequences by secondary means -- the lifeboat. Work on the CSM shifted from preserving it as the primary spacecraft to preserving it as the only viable re-entry vehicle.
At no time in any of this process was in necessary to know
why the tank had failed. They only needed to know
that the tank had failed. They had already concluded that whatever the cause, it could not be corrected by any means at their disposal within the time limit imposed by needing to have breathable oxygen and electrical power for the crew. Do not mistake contemporary assertiveness in statements or actions to some hypothetical foreknowledge.
All their actions, statements, and analysis at every step of the process was consistent with what they knew or reasonably believed at the time. This would include provisional models of the failure. Those models don't have to be absolutely correct or complete, but are useful so long as the ambiguity is not resolved by acting preclusively. It may be
helpful to know the full root-cause analysis of some failure while dealing with it, but it's not
essential, and almost never
possible.
What you're advocating is tantamount to a doctor declining to treat a patient until the autopsy determines conclusively what he had.
