I have been enjoying reading a 2023 book (I got from the Meridian Public Library) by Mike Massimino titled Moon Shot: A NASA astronaut’s guide to achieving the impossible. Chapter 5 is titled You Can Always Make It Worse, and it tells all about Hoot’s Law for dealing with a crisis. There is a brief discussion by Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company on December 7, 2023 in an article titled An astronaut shares his 30-second trick for boosting productivity.
Mike describes having trained for a space walk in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) which is a 200-foot long by 100-foot wide by 40-foot-deep pool. He got his safety tether hopelessly tangled up – between his legs, around his helmet, and around his tools. Finally, he asked Jim Newman, his spacewalk partner for help. Beginning on page 82 of the book (or here at Google Books), Mike says:
“In the battle of Mike vs. Tether, the tether had definitely won, and I spent the rest of the exercise kicking myself. Once we were out of the water, Jim took me aside and asked how my snarl got so bad. It was one of the worst he had ever seen. I told him it started out not so bad, but then I rushed, didn’t ask for help, and made it steadily worse and worse until I was totally trapped. Jim nodded and said, ‘Mike, you need to remember Hoot’s Law.’
‘What’s Hoot’s Law?’ I asked.
‘It’s something ‘Hoot’ Gibson used to say during his astronaut days: No matter how bad things may seem, you can always make it worse.’
‘Wow,’ I said, ‘Hoot Gibson was a wise astronaut.’
‘He was,’ Jim said. ‘There’s something else Hoot used to say that you might find helpful, too. ‘Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.’
Hoot’s law was sound advice. When my first snarl occurred, it wasn’t that big of a problem. But with my rushing and panicking, I made it worse. It would have been better to slow down, take a minute, and appraise the situation before acting. In other words, it would have been better to do nothing until I figured out what had happened before I rushed to action. I could also have asked Jim or the control team to help me see where my safety tether was caught, since it was hard for me to do so myself. Hoot’s Law was one of the most important lessons I ever learned.
Robert ‘Hoot’ Gibson was a naval aviator and test pilot who’d been selected as an astronaut in 1978. His flying skills and leadership qualities were legendary. Everyone liked him. During my first selection board interview in 1994, he was still on staff, serving as chief of the Astronaut Office. During my interview, he sat not far from me, smiling the entire time. I’ll never forget that. At a time when I was nervous, he gave me this wonderful smile that seemed to say, ‘It’s okay, buddy. You’re doing great.’ It was a huge comfort to me at a very stressful time.
Hoot left NASA in November 1996, soon after my classmates and I showed up, but his mantras and advice continued to be passed on from generation to generation. One of the men who made sure those lessons got passed along was Charlie Bolden. In his long and legendary career, Charlie Bolden had served as a naval aviator, a test pilot, a NASA astronaut, a United States Marine Corps general, and the head of NASA from 2009 to 2017. Even with the talent to amass that kind of experience, Charlie Bolden had suffered his own embarrassing lesson in learning Hoot’s Law. For his first spaceflight in January 1986, Charlie was assigned to be the pilot of space shuttle Columbia. Hoot was his commander. During one of their early training runs, they were doing a shuttle launch simulation – a sim – with the rest of their crew. Charlie, being the rookie, wanted to show everyone how competent he was, just like I’d done with my tether in the pool. The second they lifted off, an alarm sounded due to an electrical failure. Charlie got out his checklist an determined they had an essential electrical bus failure that had taken down one of the shuttle’s three main engines. He told Hoot what the problem was and that he would take care of it. Charlie then ran the necessary procedure, which called for flipping a switch to shut down the failed part of the electrical system to take the bad electrical bus offline. So he reached over and flipped a switch – the wrong switch, taking down the wrong electrical bus.
‘Suddenly.’ Charlie described to me, ‘it got really quiet in the simulator.’ They had already lost one engine from the first electrical failure. Charlie had now lost a second engine by taking an essential electrical source offline, which meant they were trying to get to space on one engine. Which is not possible. As the simulated gravity slowly overtook their simulated shuttle, they fell back down to the simulated Earth and crashed in the simulated ocean, dying their fiery, simulated deaths. Charlie just sat there as embarrassed as he could be, and that’s when Hoot Gibson looked over at him, put his hand on his left shoulder, and said, ‘Charles, have I ever taught you Hoot’s Law?’ “
Mike concludes the chapter:
“So, when you’re faced with what seems like a hopeless situation that can’t get any worse, remember: YOU can make it worse. Don’t let that happen, instead I suggest the following:
Remember Hoot’s Law. Think of how things could be worse if you make another mistake, and don’t create a second problem while hastily trying to solve the first problem.
Remember Joe LoPiccolo. Go slow and resist the temptation to act too quickly.
For critical corrective actions, if possible, get a second person to look over your shoulder to mke sure your action won’t lead to a worse situation.”
Charlie Bolden’s NASA oral history from 2004 has a slightly different statement of Hoot’s Law:
“No matter how bad things get, you can always make them worse.”
Right now there isn’t a Wikipedia page for Hoot’s Law, or a discussion of it on the page for Robert L. Gibson.
On December 20, 2019 I blogged about The joy of safety interlocks. In that post I referred to an article by John A. Palmer and David A. Danaher in EC&M on November 1, 2004 titled A series of preventable events leads to a power plant explosion. They describe how it began with a toilet line backup spewing sewage on control equipment. That led to hasty and botched repairs which defeated interlocks and allowed an explosive mixture of air and natural gas to develop – and over a half billion dollars of physical damage and lost revenue.
The cartoon of an owl came from Openclipart.
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