Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

A Disaster of Technology

In 1958, a hasty four months after Sputnik, Americans entered what was cal ed the space race by sending into orbit the first of a series of Explorer satel ites from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Explorer I weighed as much as a ful y packed overnight bag. It was hurled skyward on January 31

by a four-stage Jupiter-C rocket—more reliable than the navy’s Vanguard rockets, which had been exploding at liftoff. It sent back radio signals much like Sputnik’s.

Explorer I , bearing a cosmic-ray detector that pushed its weight up to thirty-two pounds, soared skyward five weeks later and disappeared into the clouds. An army team watched under the guidance of Wernher von Braun, resilient veteran of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde. They listened to the fading rumble of the rocket and the rising beep of the radio signal transmitted to their squawk box. Al seemed wel . A half hour after the launch, they held a confident news briefing.

Across the continent, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena served as the army’s main col aborator in rocket research, a team was struggling with the task of tracking the satel ite’s course. They used a room-size IBM 704 digital computer. It was temperamental.

They entered the primitively sparse data available for tracking the metal can that the army’s rocket had hurled forward: the frequency of the radio signal, changing Doppler-fashion as the velocity in the line of flight changed; the time of disappearance from the observers at Cape Canaveral; observations from other tracking stations. The

JPL team had learned that smal variations in the computer’s input caused enormous variations in its output.

Albert Hibbs, the laboratory’s young research chief, had complained about this difficulty to his former Caltech thesis adviser: Feynman.

Feynman bet that he could outcompute the computer, if fed the same data at the same rate. So when Explorer I lifted off the pad at 1:28 P.M., he sat in a JPL conference room, surrounded by staff members rapidly sorting the data for the computer. At one point Caltech’s president, Lee DuBridge, entered the room and was startled to see Feynman—who snapped, Go away, I’m busy. After a half hour Feynman rose to say he was finished: according to his calculations the rocket had plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.

He left for a weekend in Las Vegas as the trackers kept trying to coax an unambiguous answer from their computer.

Tracking stations at Antigua and Inyokern, California, persuaded themselves that they had picked an orbiting satel ite out of the background noise, and “moonwatch”

teams in Florida spent the night watching the skies. But Feynman was right. The army final y announced at 5 o’clock the next afternoon that Explorer I had failed to reach orbit.

The space shuttle Challenger rose from its launching scaffold into a cloudless sky twenty-eight years later, on January 28, 1986. A half second after liftoff, a puff of dark smoke, invisible to human eyes, spurted from the side of one of the shuttle’s two solid-fuel rockets. The launch had been postponed four times. Inside the cabin, as always, the

many-gravity acceleration pressed the crew against their seats: the commander, Francis Scobee; the pilot, Michael Smith; the mission specialists, El ison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, and Ronald McNair; an engineer from the Hughes Aircraft Company, Gregory Jarvis; and a New England schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, who had been chosen as

“Teacher in Space,” the winner of a NASA public-relations program meant to encourage the interest of children and also congressmen. The cargo bay—large enough to have carried the 1950s Jupiter-C rocket—held a pair of satel ites, a fluid-dynamics experiment, and radiation-monitoring equipment. Ice had built up overnight, and new delays had been ordered while an ice inspection team made sure it had time to melt. Seven seconds after liftoff the shuttle rol ed over in its characteristic fashion, so that it appeared to be hanging from the back of its giant disposable fuel tank, and headed east over the Atlantic, its percussive roar audible over hundreds of square miles. The breeze barely bent its column of smoke. At the one-minute mark—halfway through the brief expected lifetime of the solid-fuel rockets—a flickering light appeared where it did not belong, at a joint in the shel of the right-side rocket. The main engines reached ful power, and Scobee radioed,

“Roger. Go at throttle up.” At seventy-two seconds the two rockets began to pul in different directions. At seventy-three seconds the fuel tank burst open and released liquid hydrogen into the air, where it exploded. The shuttle felt an enormous sudden thrust. A cloud of flame and smoke enveloped it. Fragments emerged seconds later: the left

wing, like a triangular sail against the sky; the engines, stil firing; and somewhere, intact, a plummeting coffin for six men and a woman. The technologies of television, aided by satel ites lofted in earlier shuttle missions, let more people witness the event, again and again, than any other disaster in history.

Machinery out of control. The American space agency had made itself seem a symbol of technical prowess, placing teams of men on the moon and then fostering the il usion that space travel was routine—an il usion built into the very name shuttle . After the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and the chemical disaster at Bhopal, India, the space-shuttle explosion seemed a final confirmation that technology had broken free of human reins. Did nothing work any more? The dream of technology that held sway over the America of Feynman’s childhood had given way to a sense of technology as not just a vil ain but an inept vil ain. Nuclear power plants, once offering the innocent promise of inexhaustible power, had become

menacing

symbols

on

the

landscape.

Automobiles, computers, simple household appliances, or giant industrial machines—al seemed unpredictable, dangerous, untrustworthy. The society of engineers, so hopeful in the America of Feynman’s childhood, had given way to a technocracy, bloated and overconfident, col apsing under the weight of its own byzantine devices.

That was one message read in the image replayed hundreds of times that day on mil ions of television screens

—the fragmenting smoke cloud, the twin rockets veering

apart like Roman candles.

President Ronald Reagan immediately announced his determination to continue the shuttle program and expressed his support for the space agency. Fol owing government custom, he appointed an investigatory commission that would repeatedly be described as independent—the White House official y declared it “an outside group of experts, distinguished Americans who have no ax to grind”—although in actuality it was composed mostly of insiders and figures chosen for their symbolic value: its chairman, Wil iam P. Rogers, who had served as attorney general and secretary of state in Republican, administrations; Major General Donald J. Kutyna, who had headed shuttle operations for the Department of Defense; several NASA consultants and executives of aerospace contractors; Sal y Ride, the first American woman in space; Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon; Chuck Yeager, a famous former test pilot; and, a last-minute choice, Richard Feynman, a professor who brought to the next day’s newspaper accounts the tag “Nobel Prize winner.”

Armstrong said on the day of his appointment that he did not understand why an independent commission was necessary. Rogers said even more baldly, “We are not going to conduct this investigation in a manner which would be unfairly critical of NASA, because we think—I certainly think—NASA has done an excel ent job, and I think the American people do.”