Word: feynman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...account of the Challenger investigation, Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman described a curious battle that occurred as the presidential commission was compiling its final report. The commission agreed on nine recommendations to the president, but the chair, William P. Rogers, decided to add a tenth, praising NASA and urging continued government support. His motive? To add balance to the report's generally critical findings...
Formality is taboo. The president is not Dr. Goldberger but "Murph" to faculty and students alike. Professors lecture in jeans and open-collared shirts, shorts and sandals. They encourage questions and expect challenges. Gray has been known to wear a horse's head while lecturing. Feynman, who played a bongo-banging tribal chieftain in a student production of South Pacific, mixes serious physics with stand-up comedy. And Murph marked the centennial of Einstein's birth by donning pith helmet and chaps and riding an elephant across campus...
...could this happen? Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist who turned out to be one of the commission's most insightful members, probably explained it best. The joint hazard was often discussed before a flight, Feynman pointed out. "It flies and nothing happens," he theorized at a commission hearing. "Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flight--we can lower our standards a bit because we got away with it last time. It's a kind of Russian roulette." In fact, with each pull of the launch trigger, the odds...
...Feynman probed further, he was told by NASA that the surface temperature of the external tank, which contains supercold liquid oxygen (-297 degrees ) and hydrogen (-423 degrees ) had not been abnormally cold, casting doubt on a theory that liquid fuel, leaking unnoticed from the tank, had chilled the nearby booster. He also discovered that the wind on the morning of the launch had been blowing across the cold surface of the tank toward the right booster. As one NASA engineer explained, "Even a slight breeze, wafting over the external tank full of those cryogens (supercold fluids) may have been enough...
What might have caused an O ring in the right booster to fail? Panelist Feynman demonstrated one possibility at the public hearing by conducting a simple experiment in front of the TV cameras. He placed a small section of a ring in a C-clamp and submerged it in a cup of ice water. Then, removing the section and releasing it from the clamp, he concluded, "The resilience is very much reduced when the temperature is reduced." That fact may be significant, because the booster joints that the O rings are supposed to seal shift under the enormous stresses...