Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [252]
“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 called an anomaly?” Feynman asked. The witness, Arnold Aldrich, replied carefully, “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 all 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 really 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 really 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 Rockwell did call 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 challenged 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. Through Graham he arranged a series of private briefings on Saturday at NASA’s Washington headquarters. He learned more about the engines, the orbiter, and the seals. He found again that the agency’s engineers understood a long history of difficulties with the O-rings; that two- or three-inch segments of the thirty-seven-foot links had repeatedly been burned and eroded; that a critical issue was the speed with which the rubber had to press into the metal gap—in milliseconds; and that the space agency had found a bureaucratic means of simultaneously