They said it was an o ring failure, how did they figure it out when everything was blown to bits
In: 54
Feynman’s investigation basically showed that management severely downplayed the risks whereas the engineers generally had a good handle on it. He asked lots of people what they thought the odds of a catastrophic loss of the shuttle due to a failure in their subsystem, and the engineers typically replied 1 in 100, whereas the managers typically replied 1 in 10000.
Over the course of the history of shuttle launches, a kind of complacency and erosion of standards occurred. For examples, the o-rings were expected to ***not to burn through at all***, whereas on earlier flights they had seen up to a third of the thickness of the rubber burned through, typically when launched on colder days. This got written as “a safety factor of three”.
Feynman’s report is an appendix to the Rogers Commission report, and is 100% worth a read. https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
Latest Answers