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

The White House named Rogers and selected the rest of the commission from a list provided by the space agency’s

acting administrator, Wil iam R. Graham. As it happened, Graham had attended Caltech thirty years before and had often sat in on Physics X, which he remembered as the best course at Caltech. Later he had attended Feynman’s lectures at Hughes Aircraft. But he did not think of Feynman for the shuttle commission until his wife, who had accompanied him to some of the Hughes lectures, suggested the name. When Graham cal ed, Feynman said,

“You’re ruining my life.” Only later did Graham realize what he had meant: You’re using up my very short time.

Feynman was now suffering from a second rare form of cancer: Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, involving the bone marrow. In this cancer, one form of B lymphocyte, a white blood cel , becomes abnormal and produces large amounts of a protein that makes the blood sticky and thick.

Clotting becomes a danger, and the blood flows poorly to some parts of the body. Feynman’s past kidney damage was a complication. He seemed gray and wan. There was little his doctors could propose. They could not explain the presence of two such unusual cancers. Feynman himself refused to consider the speculation that the cause might lie forty years in the past, at the atomic bomb project.

He immediately arranged a briefing with his friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The day after his appointment was announced, he sat in a smal room in the central engineering building and met with a succession of engineers. The laboratory, with its advanced image-processing facilities, already had the original negatives of the thousands of photographs taken by the range cameras

as the shuttle drove skyward.

The shuttle’s solid rocket boosters were made in sections, assembled one atop another at the launch site. The joints holding the sections together had to be sealed to prevent the escape of hot gasesfrom inside the rocket. Pairs of O-rings-a quarter-inch thickspanned the 37-foot circumference. The pressure of the gas was supposed to wedge them tightly into the joints, creating the seal.

Feynman examined technical drawings and heard from engineers who had worked on the early design studies, on the solid rocket boosters, and on the engines. He learned

that the shuttle’s engineers, forming a community across the administrative boundaries that separated NASA’s various departments and subcontractors, shared a knowledge that every launch was at risk. Recurring cracks had appeared in the turbine blades of the shuttle’s engines, at the very edge of engine technology. That first day, February 4, Feynman noted that there were wel -known problems with the rubber O-rings that sealed the joints between sections of the tal solid-fuel rockets. These rings represented a remarkable scaling-up of everyday engineering for the high-technology shuttle: they were ordinary rubber rings, thinner than a pencil yet thirty-seven feet long, the circumference of the rocket. They were meant to take the pressure of hot gas and form a seal by squeezing tight into the metal joint. “O-Rings show scorching in Clevis check …” Feynman wrote in a shaky, aging hand. “Once a smal hole burn thru generates a large hole very fast! few seconds catastrophic failure.” He flew to Washington that night.

The commission began in a formal and slow-paced style.

Rogers opened the first public meeting with a declaration that NASA officials had been cooperative and that the commission would rely largely on the agency’s own investigations. The meeting began with a briefing by NASA’s

top

spaceflight

official,

Jesse

Moore.

Unexpectedly he found himself interrupted by sharp specific questions from Feynman and several other panel members. They focused on the weather, which had been so cold that ice formed on equipment throughout the launching

pad. In response, Moore denied that he had had any warning that cold could pose a problem.

That afternoon, however, another agency official, Judson A. Lovingood, from the Marshal Space Flight Center in Alabama, testified that managers for NASA and for Morton Thiokol, the builder of the solid rockets, had held a telephone conference the night before the launch to discuss, as he said, “a concern by Thiokol on low temperatures.” The discussion focused on the O-rings, he said, and Thiokol recommended that the launch proceed.

He also mentioned evidence of “blow-by”—soot showing that hot gases had burned through seals that were supposed to contain them. He emphasized, though, that the O-rings were used in pairs and that the secondary O-rings always seemed to hold. “Was that any cause for concern?”

asked General Kutyna.

“Oh, yes,” Lovingood replied. “That is an anomaly.”

Newspaper reports the next day, February 7, focused on the issue of cold weather and noted that NASA had been caught off guard by the aggressive questions. When Moore faced the commission again, Feynman immediately began a new series of questions. The chairman twice asked him to put off the questions until later. But the questioning quickly returned to the seals. Another NASA witness testified that the films showed a puff of dark smoke emerging from the side of the right-hand solid rocket six-tenths of a second after ignition. “This is what we would have cal ed an anomaly?” Feynman asked. The witness, Arnold Aldrich, replied careful y, “It is an anomaly unless we

find a film where we have seen one just like it.” Pressed by another commissioner, he said:

“Everything that I know about the certification of this seal

… is that the certification tests run on that joint show that the seal would be somewhat more stiff, but completely adequate for sealing at al temperatures in the ranges.

There was never any intention that the system couldn’t be launched in freezing conditions.”

The chairman commented protectively to Aldrich, “When we ask questions, when we continue to ask questions, we are not real y trying to point a finger,” and to Moore, “I thought it was a little unfortunate in the paper this morning that they said that—and I don’t think you real y said that—

that you had excluded the possibility that the weather had any effect… . If it appears you have excluded that to begin with, particularly because apparently Rockwel did cal and gave you a warning which you considered and decided that it was okay to go ahead—suppose that judgment was wrong. Nobody is going to blame anybody. I mean, somebody has to make those decisions.”

But Feynman immediately chal enged Moore on the view that O-ring blow-by had been acceptable because the secondary rings had held.

“You said we don’t expect it on the other O-ring,”

Feynman said. “On the other hand, you didn’t expect it on the first O-ring… . If the second O-ring gives just a little bit when the first one is giving, that is a very much more serious circumstance, because now the flow has begun.”

The air force general, Kutyna, had befriended Feynman

when they sat together at the commission’s first news conference. (“Co-pilot to pilot,” he had said softly, choosing this deferential phrase out of worry that Feynman was nervous beside a general in an imposing uniform, “comb your hair,” and Feynman, surprised, growled and asked Kutyna for a comb.) Now Kutyna joined in: “Let me add to your comment… . Once it got a path, then it burns like an acetylene torch.”

Feynman said, “I have a picture of that seal in cross section here, if anybody wants to see it.” No one responded.

For Feynman, for Rogers, for Graham, for the press, and for NASA officials, the weekend of February 8 brought surprises.

Feynman, away from home, thinking of his Los Alamos experience as the prototype for urgent group technical projects, did not want to take Saturday and Sunday off.