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

You didn’t, I assume, make any attempt to weigh budgetary considerations and safety considerations, did you?

Not at al .

You weren’t qualified for that?

No, sir… .

You had no reason to think that people who were weighing those considerations were not qualified to do it? … You didn’t feel that you were in a position or should you make those decisions about what should be done with the space program?

That’s right.

And so that the memo, which has been given a great deal of attention, sort of suggests that you were taking issue with the people who were highly qualified to make those judgments, when in fact you weren’t at al ? … You wrote the memo in the heat of the moment, and I assume you were, like everybody else in the country was, terribly disturbed and upset by the accident, and it was in that spirit or at that time when you wrote the memorandum. You didn’t real y mean to criticize for public consumption your associates or people around you, did you?

Yet by then it was clear that Cook had described the problems accurately. Feynman’s demonstration dominated the television and newspaper reports that evening and the next morning. Mul oy, under further questioning, made the

first clear acknowledgment that cold diminished the effectiveness of the seals and that the space agency had known it, although a straightforward test in the manner of Feynman’s had never been performed. When such tests were final y performed on behalf of the commission, in April, they showed that failure of the cold seals had been virtual y

inevitable—not

a

freakish

event,

but

a

consequence of the plain physics of materials, as straightforward as Feynman had made it seem with his demonstration. Freeman Dyson said later, “The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.”

One extraordinary week had passed since Feynman boarded the night flight to Washington. The commission had four months of work remaining, but it had arrived at the physical cause of the disaster.

As the seventies began and the last of the moon landings drew near, NASA had become an agency lacking a clear mission but maintaining a large established bureaucracy and a net of interconnections with the nation’s largest aerospace companies: Lockheed, Grumman, Rockwel International, Martin Marietta, Morton Thiokol, and hundreds of smal er companies. Al became contractors for the space-shuttle program, formal y known as the Space Transportation System, initial y intended as a fleet of reusable and economical cargo carriers that would replace

the individual one-use rockets of the past.

Within a decade, the shuttle had become a symbol of technology defeated by its own complexity, and the shuttle program had become a symbol of government mismanagement. Every major component had been repeatedly redesigned and rebuilt; every cost estimate offered to Congress had been exceeded many times over.

Unpublicized audits had found deception and spending abuses costing many bil ions of dol ars. The shuttle had achieved a kind of Pyrrhic reusability: the cost of refurbishing it after each flight far exceeded the cost of standard rockets. The shuttle could barely reach a low orbit; high orbits were out of the question. The missions flown were a smal fraction of those planned, and—despite NASA’s public claims to the contrary—the scientific and technological products of the shuttle were negligible. The space agency systematical y misled Congress and the public about the costs and benefits. As Feynman stated, the agency, as a matter of bureaucratic self-preservation, found it necessary “to exaggerate: to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it could fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered.” At the time of the Challenger disaster the program was breaking down internal y: by the end of the year both a shortage of spare parts and an overloaded crew-training program would have brought the flight schedule to a halt.

Yet the report of the presidential commission, issued on June 6, began by declaring that the accident had

interrupted “one of the most productive engineering, scientific, and exploratory programs in history.” It attributed to the public “a determination … to strengthen the Space Shuttle program.”

When Feynman talked about his role later, he fel back on his boy-from-the-country image of himself: “It was a great big world of mystery to me, with tremendous forces… . I hadda watch out.” He claimed no understanding of politics or bureaucracies. These were matters beyond the ken of a technical fel ow. Alone among the commissioners, however, Feynman worked to expand the scope of the investigation to include precisely the areas about which he disavowed competence: issues of decision making, communication, and risk assessment within the space agency. Kutyna told him he was the only commissioner free of political entanglements. Despite Rogers’s disapproval he insisted on conducting his own lines of inquiry and traveled alone to interview engineers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Marshal Space Flight Center in Alabama, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the headquarters of several contractors. In between, he made repeated visits to a Washington hospital for blood tests and medication for his worsening kidney, and he talked by telephone with his doctor in California, who complained about the difficulty of practicing medicine at long distance.

“I am determined to do the job of finding out what happened

—let the chips fal !” he wrote Gweneth proudly. He enjoyed the thril of the game, and he suspected that he was being careful y managed. “But it won’t work because (1) I do

technical information exchange and understanding much faster than they imagine”—he was, after al , a veteran of Los Alamos and the MIT machine shop—“and (2) I already smel certain rats that I wil not forget.”

He tried to make use of his naïveté. When Rogers showed him a draft final recommendation, effusive in its praise of the space agency—

The Commission strongly recommends that NASA continue to receive the support of the Administration and the nation. The agency constitutes a national resource and plays a critical role in space exploration and development. It also provides a symbol of national pride and technological leadership. The Commission applauds NASA’s spectacular achievements of the past and anticipates impressive achievements to come… .

—he balked, saying he lacked expertise about such policy matters, and he threatened to withdraw his signature from the report.

His protest was ineffective. The language appeared virtual y intact, as the commission’s “concluding thought”

rather than a recommendation. Although the commission learned that the decision to launch had been made over the specific objections of engineers who knew of the critical danger from the O-rings, the final report did not attempt to hold senior space-agency officials responsible for the decision. Evidence emerged showing that the history of O-

ring problems had been reported in detail to top officials, including the administrator, Beggs, in August 1985, but the commission chose not to question those officials.

Feynman’s own findings, substantial y harsher than the commission’s, were isolated in an appendix to the final report.

Feynman analyzed the computer system: 250,000 lines of code running on obsolete hardware. He also studied in detail the main engine of the shuttle and found serious defects, including a pattern of cracks in crucial turbine blades, that paral eled the problems with the solid rocket boosters. Overal he estimated that the engines and their parts were operating for less than one-tenth of their expected lifetimes. And he documented a history of ad hoc slippage in the standards used to certify an engine as safe: as cracks were found earlier and earlier in a turbine’s lifetime, the certification rules were repeatedly adjusted to al ow engines to continue flying.