Speak now or forever hold your launch?

May 10, 2021 2:34 PM

During a space launch, the flight director has all the different people check in on the net and say "go flight" clearly so that no objection can be missed. But if there were an objection, hopefully it would have been raised offline before that process, and you'd never actually get as far as the person objecting at that point. Has that process ever failed? Has anyone ever, during that "go flight" roll call, called for an abort because their objection didn't get registered before?
posted by dmd to Science & Nature (7 answers total)

While it doesn't speak to whether the issues were previously raised (and one would guess not) this wikipedia article lists Space Shuttle Abort Modes, and under the heading "Space Shuttle abort history" lists a number of aborts that happened at T-5 seconds or less.
posted by tiamat at 2:40 PM on May 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: To be clearer, I'm talking about a systemic NO GO, not something that crops up right at launch time.

I mean "goddamnit I told you three hours ago I was a NO GO".
posted by dmd at 2:43 PM on May 10, 2021

Aborts due to weather might fit your criteria. The concern would likely have been raised in advance, but not acted on since nothing is guaranteed with the weather. It wouldn't be until just before lunch when they would formally say that they couldn't launch as a result of wind, lightning, etc.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 2:50 PM on May 10, 2021

Best answer: Looks like someone asked this exact question a couple years ago on Space Exploration Stack Exchange.

TL;DR a "no-go" during the final readiness poll would be very unusual (because, as you say, if there's a "no go" condition the flight director should already be aware of it) but it seems to have happened at least once during a Shuttle launch attempt.
posted by teraflop at 2:52 PM on May 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

Well there's also a bit of culture of "if you're not going to say GO, then I'll put someone else in the chair who will" in NASAs history.
posted by ctmf at 2:52 PM on May 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Well NASA is a public records kind of place, so I guess you could check the transcripts for the aborts listed above, and see which were last second aborts in the sense of new information arriving at the last minute, and which were things they were working on fixing to the last second and couldn't fix. It's possible some of the above would meet your criteria.

The Launch status check Wikipedia article lists a number of launch videos and transcripts with one or more of these go/no go polls, and it appears that they can continue up to T-3 minutes or so (as per the STS-115 launch video linked from that wikipedia article).
posted by tiamat at 2:53 PM on May 10, 2021

Roger Boisjoly repeatedly warned of the danger of launching the Challenger in subfreezing temperature. His memos, including an explicit no-go recommendation the night before launch, were ignored/overridden, and ... well, we know what happened.

He later resigned and became a speaker on workplace ethics.
posted by basalganglia at 6:32 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]