Sorry, Feynman was a joke. As a Thiokol engineer, I sure didn’t him to explain why o-rings fail at low temperature – his great claim to fame from the Challenger accident, like he was the only person in the world that could figure this out. It was figured out and widely known for decades – rubber loses its resiliency at low temperatures. NASA required a SRB that was good to go at temperatures above X for Y dollars and that’s what Thiokol delivered. When NASA came back on the night before the Challenger launch and said we want to launch at Z (lower than X), Thiokol engineers said NO! but were overruled by their NASA a** kissing managers (I know I later worked for one of these prizewinning jerks). So, the Challenger disaster came as no surprise to us – we sure as h*** didn’t need some nobel prize winning p***k to tell us the how and why that NASA screwed the pooch.
Sorry, Feynman was a joke. As a Thiokol engineer, I sure didn’t him to explain why o-rings fail at low temperature – his great claim to fame from the Challenger accident, like he was the only person in the world that could figure this out. It was figured out and widely known for decades – rubber loses its resiliency at low temperatures. NASA required a SRB that was good to go at temperatures above X for Y dollars and that’s what Thiokol delivered. When NASA came back on the night before the Challenger launch and said we want to launch at Z (lower than X), Thiokol engineers said NO! but were overruled by their NASA a** kissing managers (I know I later worked for one of these prizewinning jerks). So, the Challenger disaster came as no surprise to us – we sure as h*** didn’t need some nobel prize winning p***k to tell us the how and why that NASA screwed the pooch.