Disaster on Mars, Part I — Pressure

What anticipating disaster can teach us about designing for failure

In the Congressional hearings following the Apollo 1 disaster, in which astronauts Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chafee were killed, fellow astronaut Frank Borman famously placed the blame for the engineering failure not on any particular part, practice, or person, but on a failure of imagination. Many failure modes were imagined and planned for with Apollo, but only failures in space. The possibility of a fatal accident in a pressurization test on Earth was simply not something anybody had thought of. What I want to do with this series of articles is try and imagine how things can fail in a broad sense, and how we can design solutions as first-class artifacts, and maybe even design things so that certain failures are irrelevant or even impossible.

In survival, there’s a rule that gives you rough numbers for how long you can survive without certain essential needs. You can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air. When Andy Weir wrote the classic novel the Martian, Mark Watney, the main character, opens with a leaky spacesuit he must patch immediately to survive. With that need met, the plot shifts to the longer-term need for food —a smart move narratively because the rule of threes for air…