The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster—Proof that All Reality Is Not Subjective, Part 2:
Dr. Richard Feynman was an atomic physicist who helped build the original atom bomb—to help make sure the Nazis didn’t build it first. In high school he started developing his own version of calculus, which is still used by mathematicians today. He was 23 when they invited him to help work on the atom bomb, and he already had his Ph.D.. He was a lot like me, because he was a guy with exceptional abilities and consequently an unusual perspective on the world, who had fun doing ordinary things and seeing what happened. He wrote three autobiographical books about his adventures, from little anecdotes about learning Japanese or studying art or picking up women or playing pranks on people or agreeing to give a lecture at a university but on the one condition that they wouldn’t make him sign his name more than twelve times, to big things, like… helping investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster.
You already know most of the story. A politician decided he wanted something to happen, and nobody ever succeeded in making him understand that it wasn’t going to work. Between the person who collected the information and the person who made the decision, either the information got watered down until it became completely different information, or else it got filtered out completely.
In this case, Ronald Reagan (yeah, another great way to start a story, isn’t it?) wanted the space shuttle Challenger to launch on a certain date. Let’s see, if I look up January 1986 in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, what do I find?
January 12 – STS-61-C: Space Shuttle Columbia is launched with the first Hispanic-American astronaut, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz.
January 20 – The first federal Martin Luther King Day, honoring Martin Luther King Jr., is observed.
January 28 – STS-51-L: Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch, killing the crew of 6 astronauts and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
Over the course of 16 days, the United States launched the first Hispanic astronaut into space, founded a national holiday observing the birth of the greatest African American leader in history, and launched the first civilian into space (or at least, tried to). And she wasn’t just any civilian, she was a woman schoolteacher. Hmmm… In the latter half of January 1986, Blacks, Hispanics, women, schoolteachers, and civilians all made landmark achievements in U.S. history. And they didn’t even make history by struggling against oppression and beating recognition out of their oppressors, which is how minority groups usually have to win recognition. Within just over two weeks, a conservative president of the United States handed over historical recognition to Blacks, Hispanics, and women. That’s got to be the first time in history something like that has ever happened. What a coincidence!
Wow, 1986 sure got off to a good start. Let me go back to the online encyclopedia and see what else happened that year…
Hmmm… A new president in Uganda, the president of Haiti fled his country, Halley’s Comet passed by the Earth, a Soviet ocean liner ran aground off the coast of New Zealand… Oh, my, look at this:
February 19 – The Soviet Union launches the Mir space station.
Oh, wow, that’s very interesting, I wonder what else happened that year. Oh, look at this entry:
February 19 – After waiting 37 years, the United States Senate approves a treaty outlawing genocide.
Gee, what a coincidence! After debating for 37 years on a law outlawing genocide, the U.S. Senate finally approved it on the exact same day the Soviets launched the Mir space station! Look at all those Americans and Soviets making history at the exact same time!
Hmmm… with all that history-making going on in America, I wonder what the American media had to say about it? I wonder if they got completely wrapped up in all the landmark achievements that were being made by Blacks and Hispanics and women and schoolteachers and ordinary civilians, and then this big victory against genocide… And of course, most if not all major American media outlets are owned by Jews, so a federal law against genocide that was finally passed after 37 years would’ve been really important to the people who call the shots on network TV news… Gee, I wonder if the U.S. media would’ve gotten so preoccupied with all this American history being made that they would completely overlook the Soviet Union launching a space station into space, when the United States didn’t have one yet. And I wonder if Ronald Reagan had anything to do with making all this stuff happen…
And of course, what happens when news anchors report history being made? They put ideas into the consciousness of a whole lot of people, and those people’s brains pull a whole lot of other ideas out of their subconsciousness to go with them. That sure is a whole lot of ideas about good things happening in America being dumped into the consciousnesses of the American public right around the time America’s mortal enemy was making history by doing something that no one on Earth had ever done before. With all these great things happening in America, who really gives a f*ck about the Russians launching some space station thing into space?
On the one hand, all of this could’ve happened by coincidence. On the other hand, President Reagan could’ve been flooding the American public with information packages that all added up to the idea “America is the greatest country ever”, which necessarily brings with it the subconscious information package “the Soviet Union isn’t the greatest country ever”. And if America is the greatest country ever and the Soviet Union isn’t, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not the people in the Soviet space program succeed at something that no one else on Earth has ever done before, does it?
Oh, wait a second, but I came here to talk about the group psychology surrounding the Challenger disaster itself…
By setting a deadline by which the shuttle must launch, a variable was added into the design process of the shuttle that wouldn’t’ve been there otherwise. Ordinarily, space shuttle engineers work with the goal of designing a space shuttle that can fly safely. Once a politician got involved and gave them a schedule, now the engineers were trying to build a space shuttle that could fly safely by a certain date. With that additional variable introduced into the process, potential conflict was introduced. That potential conflict became real conflict when the engineers started running into problems they weren’t going to be able to solve in time to launch on schedule.
Ordinarily, the space shuttle engineers could’ve solved their problem by saying, “We thought we were going to be able to launch on this date, but now we’ve run into an unexpected setback, so f*ck you, we’re going be delayed two months.” This time around, however, when they said, “This is sh*t and it stinks,” by the time their report reached the president, it got turned into, “It’s a great idea, let’s do it.”
Specifically, the O-rings in the shuttle were made out of rubber. That rubber was going to be subjected to a hell of a lot of heat instantaneously when the engines were fired. That heat was going to cause everything in the space shuttle to expand by thermal expansion. In order to maintain the seal the O-rings were there to create, the O-rings were going to have to expand within millionths of a second.
Eventually, the scientists who were investigating the disaster traced the problem down to the O-rings. The way the O-ring rubber was formulated, it would expand the way it was supposed expand most of the time. But when its temperature dropped below a certain point, it stopped working.
The engineers knew this, and they tried to tell their managers or whoever about the problem. But somewhere between them and President Reagan, somebody stopped caring. The official NASA management estimate for the reliability of the O-rings put their chances of failure at about 1 in 100,000. Based on his own analysis, Dr. Feynman predicted the failure rate at approximately 1 in 50. Since 100,000 rockets hadn’t been launched, there really was no way anyone could determine a failure rate of 1 in 100,000. On the other hand, by studying the numbers of O-rings that had come off of rockets and had suffered from erosion or non-disastrous blow-by—meaning, things that weren’t supposed to be happening to the O-rings, meaning, failures—their chances of failures came in at 1 in 50.
So why would the engineers who were studying spacecraft that had returned report a failure rate of 1 in 50, but the NASA management put the failure rate at 1 in 100,000?
But even the accident investigation committee was a group of people, so group psychology set in here too, and nobody dared to be more critical of NASA than anyone else. Nobody except Dr. Feynman, that is. Dr. Feynman disagreed with the official group report so strongly that he wrote his own report and insisted that it be filed as an appendix to the official report, or else he would take his name off the official report. You can read it on the internet now if you want. He shreds the NASA management up one side and down the other. He concludes it like this:
If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.
In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that McAuliffe was equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?
Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.