After logging 356 hours in outer space riding shuttles, Mike Mullane is quite willing to spin a few yarns about riding rocket ships and taking space walks. He'll even explain in some detail how astronauts sleep and yes go to the bathroom in space where gravity is zero. Well, we will spare the details here, but it is still a rather interesting topic and it's one of the most frequently asked questions of astronauts, so Mullane has simply included those topics as part of his 70 minute presentation.
The Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast Regional College partnered with Enbridge Pipelines Inc. and other local sponsors to latch on to the opportunity to bring Mullane to Estevan as part of a fundraising project to help offset costs associated with the construction of the College's Energy Training Institute in Estevan.
Mullane's main message during his address to about 220 people who had gathered in the Days Inn Plaza on Sept. 30, was one of refusing to compromise safety.
"There is a responsibility factor, especially in the leadership roles, but when it comes to safety, we all have to be leaders. I call it self-leadership," said Mullane.
He cited examples when deviations were made from normal safety practices. The results were tragedies.
Mullane said the explosion aboard the Challenger space rocket 73 seconds into flight, 24 years ago, was one tragic consequence of what can happen when there was a "normalization of deviance."
Simple O-rings used in the rocket booster system were the weak link that led to the death of seven astronauts as the exploded rocket ship fell into the ocean.
Mullane said the weakness of the O-rings had been pointed out in 14 of 24 earlier space flights, but no corrections had been made and it had come to the point where "there was an expectation that some damage was probably going to be done to the O-rings. So instead of shutting the program down, they began to normalize the deviance from accepted safety practices," he said.
In other words, nothing had happened before when the weakness manifested itself, so it must be OK to continue.
Similar weaknesses that ultimately led to the loss of seven more lives, occurred with the space shuttle Columbia seven years ago, he said.
The Deepwater Horizon offshore well blowout in the Gulf Coast a few months ago, was another example of compromising safety for the sake of budget and schedules, again resulting in the loss of lives and other devastating consequences, he said.
"The O-ring weakness in spacecraft was pointed out and recorded at least two years before Challenger," said Mullane. "But when the fault was exposed, no one would say 'ground the fleet' because of the cost at the time. They were doing 26 flights a year and the business model was the god, not safety, and so seven astronauts died," said Mullane who had already been in space orbit twice before Challenger, and went up again four more times after that tragic episode in the American space program.
The retired astronaut from Texas, now preaches safety first in all things, for obvious reasons. He lost friends in those explosions.
"The attitude was that it worked OK once, so you take the shortcut again the next time, and you become used to accepting false feedback. Don't let that happen to local safety practices," he told the audience, comprised mainly of oil patch employees and managers.
"What you'll get if you do, is a predictable surprise ," he said.
"We're all guilty of committing the sin of deviance of safety," said Mullane. "Data gets interpreted to rationalize a business plan, not to address safety. So you get away with it once, and a second time, so the weakness gets built into the future plans and you go do it again. That's what happened with the O-ring weakness. It went from being an intolerable weakness that should have shut down the program, to being an expected deviance. When that happens, you become vulnerable.
You need to plan the work and work the plan. You need to be aware of situations you're heading into and you need to think ahead and yes, budget and schedule are part of the plan, but safety trumps it all," Mullane said.
The former astronaut said the best thing to do after the fact is to review and keep talking about corporate safety so the memory is retained for future users of the plan.
He said that is what NASA does, but there were still errors and compromises made that led to tragic ends.
"Don't just be a passenger when it comes to safety," he said, citing one example of when he decided to be a passenger in a two-man jet during his early military days. He surrendered his safety concerns to a more experienced pilot regarding fuel supply on the plane which led to near-tragic consequences as the plane ran out of fuel just prior to landing at a military air base, causing him and the pilot to eject while a plane worth tens of millions of dollars was destroyed.
"I showed a reluctance to confront on that occasion because I was young and wanted to be accepted and I feared rejection, and he was more experienced and I didn't want to jeopardize our friendship. As a result, we almost died. Never assume that someone else will do it. Don't fear the boss or feel that it's not your job, so you don't have to worry about it. Safety trumps it all," Mullane said.
"When it comes to safety, as I said before, you can't afford to be a passenger and for the managers here, you have to treat your employees like customers and show some safety leadership. As the former American president Andrew Jackson said, 'one person with courage forms a majority.'"
Mullane was thanked by Craig Brown, president and CEO of the Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast Regional College.
It was noted earlier in the program that the multi-million dollar ETI Institute is now under construction and scheduled to open for classes next spring.
