Human Error

In the near future from a 1950’s perspective, the first space station, in orbit around the Earth, gets knocked out of orbit due to pilot miscalculation. The subsequent disaster, with shuttle and space station crash landing near San Francisco, creates a public furor calling for the end of the space program. General Oglethorpe, the earth side base commander in charge of the space program, recruits Dr. Paul Medick, an expert in psychology and psychometrics, to head a new project: to eliminate human error. Oglethorpe is certain that men can be made to be more mechanical, operating with the same reliability of the machines which they operate. The government had spent one billion dollars to convince the human race that men ought to be ashamed to be men—instead of being cybernetic machines incapable of miscalculation.. But they did not consider that an error less man is a dead man. A fast-paced pulp classic which originally appeared in the April 1956 issue of If Worlds of Science Fiction.