CNN, Feynman and the Challenger disaster

good evening here's what's happening the report on the space shuttle disaster is now in President Reagan's hands and the public will get a look at it on Monday tonight CNN's John Hollman reports some hard-fought battles among members of the investigative commission that wrote the report one member was harshly critical of NASA and therein lies the tale that John hullman unfolds now from Washington commission member Richard feineman charged that NASA had virtually ignored the principles of physics and good scientific practice in designing testing and building the space shuttle the Nobel prize winning physicist wrote a section of the final report known as chapter F commission sources say chairman William Rogers read the chapter and was Furious he called pinan to Washington Wednesday and urged him to tone down his criticism of NASA because chapter F threatened to destroy public confidence in the space agency binan returned to his home in California and began his rewrite but then changed his mind sources close to the scientists say he felt his ethics were being being compromised he sent a message to Rogers threatening to resign from the commission and demanding his name be taken off the final report if his chapter was not included in its entirety after a day of tense negotiation Fineman agreed to stay on the commission and sign the final document but the result of all this is that President Reagan will not read Dr Fan's criticism this weekend at Camp David his chapter will be printed and released as part of the lengthy appendix to the report at the White House a senior Administration official says there's still no consensus on a fourth shuttle Orbiter but CNN has learned the president does support the plan to replace Challenger the senior officials says if the fourth Orbiter is approved the president will ask Congress to appropriate money to build it rather than take money from current NASA programs John hollan CNN Washington the members one promises to be somewhat more harsh in its evaluation of the space agency than the general commission report being made public today sources close to the panel say the Nobel physicist Richard finman had concluded that the chances of a catastrophic shuttle accident were far greater than NASA had predicted before the Challenger disaster did happen Dr fman you may remember was one of the more skeptical members of the Rogers commission he' asked some of the tougher questions of the NASA Witnesses in fact he had threatened not to sign the final report out today because it was he thought not Tough Enough later however Professor pman reached an agreement with William Rogers on the report's language and he signed the report being made public today good morning with us now for a newsmaker interview as a key member of the presidential commission he is Richard feineman the Nobel prize winning physicist from the California Institute of Technology welcome sir was this an accident that did not have to happen yes yes it was it was uh an accident that had many many warnings that there was something wrong and that it might sooner or later go off and uh the warnings were dis disregarded disregarded out of incompetence out of a faulty system out of bad judgment out of for what reason I had some difficulty with that I kind of imagine that something like a child that runs in the in the road and the parent is very upset and says it's very dangerous and the child comes back and says but nothing happen and he runs out in the road again several times and parent keeps saying it's dangerous and nothing happens if the child's view that nothing happened is a clue that there was nothing going to happen then that's going to be an accident you could hear Brak squealing a couple of times that's leakage and the gas is going through the Rings and so forth but again and again I saw in looking through this statements this new flight is within our database which just means nothing happened before it's about the same as we did before so it can't be unsafe because it was okay last time and that is a kind of childish attitude that uh the mother correspond to the engineers here right and the management corresponding to the children and that's the way I look at it and I don't know what you would say sooner or later the child gets run over is it an accident no it's not an accident and yet your commission and we just heard uh chairman Rogers your chairman say we should we're not here to blame anybody why not why not why is somebody not blamed I don't know how to assign blame and whether it does any good the question is how do we educate the child uh the question is you could say you blame the child for being a little foolish but it's very difficult I tried to figure out why they have this this attitude and why they weren't paying attention I've tried various theories and I really don't know the ultimate cause what's your theory well one of the there's two the people a lot of people say to me that there's some kind of of an idea in management that the incompetence reaches its level or whatever but I had another idea which I don't know whether it's right and that is that in the beginning all kinds of exaggerations were made about what this thing can do it can fly 60 flights it will only cost so much it'll be recoverable and there'll be no real problems the engineers at the bottom has probably scream this is my imagination they're screaming up no no it can't be this way it can't be this way we can only go 10 flights we haven't got enough equipment to train that many crews a year so forth and so on and the people at the top were talking to Congress don't want to hear this and so they discourage information from moving up you see it was just after they were so successful with Apollo and in that case they were doing a project with just a little bit harder than they could do just a little bit harder so they could do it and it would solve one problem this is my imag I'm imagine I was somebody would say we can how we going to make a space finally they got a solution to that they get excited and tell the others fell are working on some other problem gets a solution to his problem and there's a lot of intercommunication because there's excitement and motivation but when the people which is not always necessarily a bad thing right no not at all it's what makes it Go and that's why it worked okay with the Apollo but then when they had this other project which is so to speak impossible from an engineering point of view it's unrealistic they don't want to hear what happens it does goes up and each level in a bureaucracy kind of understands what it's supposed to do keep it from the other guys they don't have to hear it they don't want to hear it they don't want to hear it because it would be uncomfortable to be going and saying we're going to do 60 flights a year when just that morning they were told that it's impossible that's with Theory now I as you know you're a professor of physics and not of management and human relations and so it's very likely not right but you asked me for my theory at the one of the hearings by in fact I think it was the first public hearing you took a glass of water and dropped a piece of uh Rubber seal into a glass of water and made the demonstration that cold weather is not necessarily a good thing for a Rubber seal have you proven was your theory in the glass been proven correct do you think that's really what caused the seal to go bad it was too cold that's one of the one of the possibilities uh certainly was one of the possibilities it's definite that when the temperature is reduced on this the seals the way they were being used in that device in the shuttle temperature has a very bad effect what caused a certain amount of trouble is that o o-ring seals is used auto in automobiles and so on are in a position where the space is constant that the the space that they have to isn't move and therefore resilience is not vital and the temperature is not it's not sensitive to temperature so everybody thought seals are not sensitive to temperature but the way this seal was being used the space ing between the Rings and so on would vibrate as the thing blew up with the pressure and would move and the ring has to follow that and when it's cold it can't follow that so that's definitely a possible contributor but as we looked into this thing we found so many other problems associated with the seal design that there was a kind of putty that could have holes blown into it there was problems about whether there were all other kinds of difficulties I got you so com we couldn't decide exactly what it was and I wouldn't be able to say that it was solely the temperature but that certainly was a possibility how do you feel about the job your commission did generally I think we did a pretty good job it turned out to be easier in some respects than we could have imagined it was easy to find out what happened I but I was curious why did Chairman Rogers uh say at the White House today that it would turned out to be more difficult than he thought it was going to be what was he talking about well maybe we had different expectations it's strange because at the very beginning of this commission meeting I remember Mr Rogers saying well of course we may never find out what made the accident occur and that turned out that's what I meant was easy I see you know what happened and we know what happened now the what was difficult and I think maybe he's referring to this was the discovery of these weaknesses inside of NASA and their attitudes MH this kind of illogic about safety and so forth which was so extensive from an organization which had such a reputation in the country that it was hard for us to find it out in a sort of emotional way as to have to come around and say that the wizard of ozs which everybody respects has nothing behind it the New York Times almost nothing almost okay the New York Times reported this morning that you had some you had a clash with uh chairman Rogers over an appendix and other and also U Elizabeth Brackett in her report referred to that passing what's that all about well that's terribly exaggerated got into the news somehow I have no control of news have no experience with uh at one point I had written a document which was meant for the other Commissioners I had investigated a number of things and I was just sending them a note telling them what i' found and it wasn't written for publication uh then there was a discussion the various commissioner members who looked at it said it was pretty good and we ought to just put it in the report but it wasn't it was written in a personal style it wasn't proper for the rest of the report so since we're going going have appendices which have a lot of detail they said let's put it in appendix and I'm very happy with that but because we had this habit of modifying and and trying to keep things short by cutting things down that were repetitious and there were some things in there that were also in the report it started to modify this and I looked at it and I thought it was nice the way I wrote it you know so I asked that it be put in the since it was in the appendix and we weren't so worried about space let's leave it in the appendix with any modification at all and they said okay but look at this sentence isn't written very well and I agreed definitely it was only a suggestion that I changed the sentence and I changed it not because I lost any ideas I had said the same idea in a careful and much more quiet way earlier on in a paragraph and there was no need to repeat it it improved the sentence it's just typographical I also made another change where I found a sentence had bad grammar nobody knows about that one there's no stink about that one so there's no stink here there's no stink here at all no sir there's no problem it so as far as you're concerned you're this was a unanimous report from the commission and uh sir you didn't go away with any scars and neither to Chairman Rog all right Dr fman don't go away we'll be back thank you Charlene NASA

Channel: vsrr83

Views: 622,679

Keywords: Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (Disaster), Richard Feynman (Academic)

Id: 4kpDg7MjHps

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2015