Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [253]
• The lack of a good secondary seal in the field joint is most critical and ways to reduce joint rotation should be incorporated as soon as possible to reduce criticality… .
• Analysis of existing data indicates that it is safe to continue flying… .
Elsewhere at NASA headquarters that day, Graham learned that a storm was about to break: the New York Times had obtained documents showing urgent warnings within NASA about O-ring problems over a period of at least four years. Graham had taken control of the agency only recently, when the administrator, James Beggs, was indicted on fraud charges unrelated to NASA. He immediately telephoned Rogers.
The article appeared Sunday, quoting warnings even more dire than those the engineers had shown Feynman: that a failure of the seals could cause “loss of vehicle, mission, and crew due to metal erosion, burn-through, and probable case bursting resulting in fire and deflagration,” and that
There is little question … that flight safety has been and is being compromised by potential failure of the seals, and it is acknowledged that failure during launch would certainly be catastrophic.
That morning Graham himself took Feynman to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, where he sat in a cavernous theater and watched an inspirational giant-screen film about the space shuttle. He was surprised at how emotional he felt.
In the afternoon Kutyna called Feynman at his hotel. As shuttle program manager for the military, Kutyna knew the shuttle more intimately than any other commissioner. He also knew how to run a technical commission, because he had headed the air force’s own investigation into the explosion of a Titan rocket the year before. And he had his own information sources among the engineers and astronauts—one of whom told him over the weekend that Thiokol had known of a potential loss of resiliency when the rubber O-rings were cold. Kutyna wanted to bring this information into the open without jeopardizing his source. He invited Feynman to his house for Sunday dinner. Afterward they went out to his garage—he collected junk cars as a hobby, and at the moment he was working on an old Opel GT. Its carburetor happened to be sitting on his workbench. He told Feynman, you know, those things leak when it’s cold, so do you think cold might have a similar effect on the shuttle O-rings?
Rogers called a closed meeting Monday in reaction to the New York Times revelations. He made clear that he considered them a disruption of his proceedings: “I think it goes without saying that the article in the New York Times and other articles have created an unpleasant, unfortunate situation. There is no point in dwelling on the past.” NASA representatives were asked to respond: “I think that his statement in here where he says that it might be catastrophic I think is overstated,” said one, and Rogers remarked, “Well, that may be.” Lawrence Mulloy, project manager for the solid rockets testified that the rubber in the O-rings was required to operate across an enormous temperature range, from minus 30 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. He did not know of any test results, however, on the actual resiliency of the O-rings at low temperatures.
Mulloy returned the next morning to give the commissioners a briefing—another in the genre that Kutyna thought of as “telling which was the pointy end of the shuttle because they don’t know that much about it.” He brought more than a dozen charts and diagrams and gave a vivid flavor of the engineering jargon—the tang end up and the clevis end down, the grit blast, the splashdown loads and cavity collapse loads, the Randolph type two zinc chromate asbestos-filled putty laid up in strips—all forbidding to the listening reporters if not to the commissioners themselves. “How are these materials, this putty and the rubber, affected by extremes of temperature? …” one