What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard P. Feynman

Author:Richard P. Feynman [Feynman, Richard P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-30T15:34:33+00:00

THE COLD FACTS

99

That's all he had to tell me. It was a clue for which I got a lot of credit later, but it was his observation. A professor of theoretical physics always has to be told what to look for. He just uses his knowledge to explain the observations of the experimenters!

On Monday morning General Kutyna and I went over to Graham's office and asked him if he had any information on the effects of temperature on the O-rings. He didn't have it on hand, but said he would get it to us as soon as possible.

Graham did, however, have some interesting photographs to show us. They showed a flame growing from the right-hand solid rocket booster a few seconds before the explosion. It was hard to tell exactly where the flame was coming out, but there was a model of the shuttle right there in the office. I put the model on the floor and walked around it until it looked exactly like the picture—in size, and in orientation.

I noticed that on each booster rocket there's a little hole—

called the leak test port—where you can put pressure in to test the seals. It's between the two O-rings, so if it's not closed right and if the first O-ring fails, the gas would go out through the hole, and it would be a catastrophe. It was just about where the flame was. Of course, it was still a question whether the flame was coming out of the leak test port or a larger flame was coming out farther around, and we were seeing only the tip of it.

That afternoon we had our emergency closed meeting to hear from the guy whose story was in the New York Times. His name was Mr. Cook. He was in the budget department of NASA when he was asked to look into a possible seals problem and to estimate the costs needed to rectify it.

By talking to the engineers, he found out that the seals had been a big problem for a long time. So he reported that it would cost so-and-so much to fix it—a lot of money. From the point of view of the press and some of the commissioners, Mr. Cook's story sounded like a big expose, as if NASA was hiding the seals problem from us.

I had to sit through this big, unnecessary excitement, wondering if every time there was an article in the newspaper, would we have to have a special meeting? We would never get anywhere that way!

But later, during that same meeting, some very interesting things happened. First, we saw some pictures which showed

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