It's been some time but I've read the entire report cover-to-cover. While yes, the general conclusion is that NASA's dysfunctional management structure and institutional optimism driven by moneyed interests is the primary culprit. The report never really tries to perform a root cause analysis on how something like the O-ring "safety factor" problem arose.
Something which, as summarized by Feynman's quote above, should be patently obvious to any engineer as bullshit.
Feynman's appendix is the only part that even tries, but it doesn't go far enough through no fault of Feynman's, he had no resources to pursue this line of inquiry. It was a struggle just to get that appendix into the report.
They should have interviewed every single person in any way remotely involved in that O-ring decision, find out if they objected to it, and if they didn't what money/institutional/social obstacles there were to prevent that.
Did some engineer actually sign off on the aforementioned "safety factor"? We don't know, but somehow I doubt that's language management came up with on their own, and if they did that there was no way for an engineer to spot that and report "wtf? The system doesn't work like that!".
Reading between the lines some engineer actually did come up with that estimate, but likely that engineer was where he was because NASA had a culture of promoting mindless yes-men.
> It's been some time but I've read the entire report cover-to-cover.
I meant Feynman's later recounting of the whole affair (in "What do you care what other people think"), rather than just the report.
> Did some engineer actually sign off on the aforementioned "safety factor"? We don't know, but somehow I doubt that's language management came up with on their own
That doesn't mean they were fed that by an engineer, only that they'd encountered the term before.
> and if they did that there was no way for an engineer to spot that and report "wtf? The system doesn't work like that!".
And then what? Upper-management uses "safety factor" in a completely bullshit manner, and engineer spots that (because they're masochistic and read management reports?), tells their direct manager it's inane, and then what, you think it's going to go up the chain to upper-management which will fix the issue? Because IIRC (I don't have my copy of What Do You Care on me so I can't check) Feynman noted that engineering systematically got lost somewhere along management ladder as one middle-manager decided not to bother their manager with a mere engineer (or worse, technician!)'s concern or suggestions.
> Reading between the lines some engineer actually did come up with that estimate, but likely that engineer was where he was because NASA had a culture of promoting mindless yes-men.
That's really not what I read behind the lines considering engineers had failure estimates in the % range and management had estimates in the per-hundred-thousand range.
> I meant Feynman's later recounting of the whole affair
I've read that too. You're dangerously close to getting me to re-read everything Feynman's written, again. I don't know whether to curse you or thank you :)
> And then what? [...]
I feel we're in violent agreement as to what the actual problem at NASA was, yes, I'm under no illusion that if some engineer had raised these issues it would have gone well for him. This is made clear in the opening words of Feynman's analysis,:
[...] It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the
probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The
estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher
figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from
management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of
agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a
Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could
properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the
machinery?"
I'm pointing out, not to disagree with you, but just to use your comment as a springboard, that to an outside observer this whole process led to some "moronic engineering". Engineering is the sum of the actual construction & design process and the management structure around it.
The real flaw in the report is that it didn't explore how that came to be institutional practice at NASA, Feynman is the only one who tried.
> That's really not what I read behind the lines.
Regardless of what sort of dysfunctional management practices there were at NASA they couldn't have launched the thing without their engineers. If they were truly of the opinion that shuttle reliability was 3 orders of magnitude less than what management thought, perhaps they should have refused to work on it until that death machine was grounded pending review.
Of course that wouldn't have been easy, but it's our responsibility as engineers to consider those sorts of options in the face of dysfunctional management, especially when lives are on the line.
I think the engineers (and astronauts) accepted 1 in 100 odds of failure as a price they were willing to accept to be part of the project. That is not a "death machine", just a risky and exciting one. For comparison, that risk is equivalent to working 5 years in a coal mine in the 1960's.
https://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-coal-mining...
Yes, which is fair enough, and personally I think that's fine. With odds like that you'll still get people to sign up as astronauts, and it'll be easier to advance the science. In the grand scheme of things it's silly to worry about those deaths and not say death from traffic accidents.
The real issue was that that's not how NASA presented it outwardly. I doubt that teacher that blew up with Challenger was told about her odds of surviving in those terms.
As human launch vehicles go I think the shuttle's reliability was fine. The reason I called it a death machine is that if you make a vehicle that explodes 1% of the time you better advertise that pretty thoroughly before people step on board. NASA didn't.
Something which, as summarized by Feynman's quote above, should be patently obvious to any engineer as bullshit.
Feynman's appendix is the only part that even tries, but it doesn't go far enough through no fault of Feynman's, he had no resources to pursue this line of inquiry. It was a struggle just to get that appendix into the report.
They should have interviewed every single person in any way remotely involved in that O-ring decision, find out if they objected to it, and if they didn't what money/institutional/social obstacles there were to prevent that.
Did some engineer actually sign off on the aforementioned "safety factor"? We don't know, but somehow I doubt that's language management came up with on their own, and if they did that there was no way for an engineer to spot that and report "wtf? The system doesn't work like that!".
Reading between the lines some engineer actually did come up with that estimate, but likely that engineer was where he was because NASA had a culture of promoting mindless yes-men.