'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'

by Richard P Feynman

  Being very immodest, I believed her.

  Well, it’s one thing to figure out what went wrong with the shuttle. But the next thing would be to find out what was the matter with the organization of NASA. Then there are questions like, “Should we continue with the shuttle system, or is it better to use expendable rockets?” And then come even bigger questions: “Where do we go from here?” “What should be our future goals in space?” I could see that a commission which started out trying to find out what happened to the shuttle could end up as a commission trying to decide on national policy, and go on forever!

  That made me quite nervous. I decided to get out at the end of six months, no matter what.

  But I also resolved that while I was investigating the accident, I shouldn’t do anything else. There were some physics problems I was playing with. There was a computer class at Caltech I was teaching with another professor. (He offered to take over the course.) There was the Thinking Machines Company in Boston I was going to consult for. (They said they would wait.) My physics would have to wait, too.

  By this time it was Sunday. I said to Gweneth, “I’m gonna commit suicide for six months,” and picked up the telephone.

  The Cold Facts

  WHEN I called Graham and accepted, he didn’t know exactly what the commission was going to do, who it was going to be under, or even if I would be accepted onto it. (There was still hope!)

  But the next day, Monday, I got a telephone call at 4 P.M.: “Mr. Feynman, you have been accepted onto the commission”—which by that time was a “presidential commission” headed by William P. Rogers.

  I remembered Mr. Rogers. I felt sorry for him when he was secretary of state, because it seemed to me that President Nixon was using the national security adviser (Kissinger) more and more, to the point where the secretary of state was not really functioning.

  At any rate, the first meeting would be on Wednesday. I figured there’s nothing to do on Tuesday—I could fly to Washington Tuesday night—so I called up Al Hibbs and asked him to get some people at JPL* who know something about the shuttle project to brief me.

  On Tuesday morning I rush over to JPL, full of steam, ready to roll. Al sits me down, and different engineers come in, one after the other, and explain the various parts of the shuttle. I don’t know how they knew, but they knew all about the shuttle. I got a very thorough, high-speed, intense briefing. The guys at JPL had the same enthusiasm that I did. It was really quite exciting.

  FIGURE 3. The beginning offeynman’s notes from his informal JPL briefing.

  When I look at my notes now, I see how quickly they gave me hints about where to look for the shuttle’s problems. The first line of my notes says “Inhibit burning. Liner.” (To inhibit propellant from burning through the metal wall of each booster rocket, there’s a liner, which was not working right.) The second line of my notes says “O-rings show scorching in clevis check.” It was noticed that hot gas occasionally burned past the O-rings in booster-rocket field joints.

  On the same line it says “Zn CrO4 makes bubbles.” (The zinc chromate putty, packed as an insulator behind the O-rings, makes bubbles which can become enlarged

  FIGURE 4. Detailed diagram of a field joint.

  FIGURE 5. Photograph of bubbles in zinc chromate putty, which can lead to erosion of the O-rings.

  very fast when hot gas leaks through, eroding the O-rings.)

  The engineers told me how much the pressures change inside the solid rocket boosters during flight, what the propellant is made of, how the propellant is cast and then baked at different temperatures, the percentages of asbestos, polymers, and whatnot in the liner, and all kinds of other stuff. I learned about the thrusts and forces in the engines, which are the most powerful engines for their weight ever built. The engines had many difficulties, especially cracked turbine blades. The engineers told me that some of the people who worked on the engines always had their fingers crossed on each flight, and the moment they saw the shuttle explode, they were sure it was the engines.

  If the engineers didn’t know something, they’d say something like, “Oh, Lifer knows about that; let’s get him in.” Al would call up Lifer, who would come right away. I couldn’t have had a better briefing.

  It’s called a briefing, but it wasn’t brief: it was very intense, very fast, and very complete. It’s the only way I know to get technical information quickly: you don’t just sit there while they go through what they think would be interesting; instead, you ask a lot of questions, you get quick answers, and soon you begin to understand the circumstances and learn just what to ask to get the next piece of information you need. I got one hell of a good education that day, and I sucked up the information like a sponge.

  That night I took the red-eye* to Washington, and got there early Wednesday morning. (I never took the red-eye again—I learned!)

  I checked into the Holiday Inn in downtown Washington, and got a cab to take me to the first meeting of the commission.

  “Where to?” the driver says.

  All I have is a little piece of paper. “1415 8th Street.”

  We start off. I’m new in Washington. The Capitol is over here, the Washington Monument is over there; everything seems very close. But the taxi goes on and on, farther and farther into worse and worse territory. Buildings get smaller, and they begin to look run down a little bit. Finally, we get onto 8th Street, and as we go along, the buildings begin to disappear altogether. Finally we find the address—by interpolation: it’s an empty lot between two buildings!

  By this time I realize something is completely cockeyed. I don’t know what to do, because I’ve only got this slip of paper, and I don’t know where to go.

  I say to the taxi driver, “The meeting I’m going to has something to do with NASA. Can you take me to NASA?”

  “Sure,” he says. “You know where it is, don’t you? It’s right where I picked you up!”

  It was true. NASA I could have walked to from the Holiday Inn: it was right across the street! I go in, past the guard at the gate, and start wandering around.

  I find my way to Graham’s office, and ask if there’s a meeting about the shuttle.

  “Yes, I know where it is,” somebody says. “I’ll take you down there.”

  They take me to a room and, sure enough, there’s a big meeting going on: there are bright lights and television cameras down in front; the room is completely full, bursting with people, and all I can do is barely squash my way into the back. I’m thinking, “There’s only one door to this place. How the hell am I gonna get down to the front from here?”

  Then I overhear something a little bit—it’s so far down there that I can’t make out exactly what it is—but it’s evidently a different subject!

  So I go back to Graham’s office and find his secretary. She calls around and finds out where the commission is meeting. “I don’t know, either,” she says to the person on the other end. “He simply wandered in here!”

  The meeting was in Mr. Rogers’ law offices, at 1415 H Street. My slip of paper said 1415 8th Street. (The address had been given over the telephone.)

  I finally got to Mr. Rogers’ office—I was the only one late—and Mr. Rogers introduced me to the other commissioners. The only one I had ever heard of besides Mr. Rogers was Neil Armstrong, the moon man, who was serving as vice-chairman. (Sally Ride was on the commission, but I didn’t realize who she was until later.*) There was a very handsome-looking guy in a uniform, a General Kutyna (pronounced Koo-TEE-na). He looked formidable in his outfit, while the other people had on ordinary suits.

  This first meeting was really just an informal get-together. That bothered me, because I was still wound up like a spring from my JPL briefing the day before.

  Mr. Rogers did announce a few things. He read from the executive order that defined our work:

  The Commission shall:

  1. Review the circumstances surrounding the accident and establish the probable cause or causes of the accident; an
d

  2. Develop recommendations for corrective or other action based upon the Commission’s findings and determinations.

  Mr. Rogers also said we would complete our investigation within 120 days.

  That was a relief: the scope of our commission would be limited to investigating the accident, and our work might be finished before I was done committing suicide!

  Mr. Rogers asked each of us how much of our time we could spend on the commission. Some of the commissioners were retired, and almost everybody said they had rearranged their schedules, I said, “I’m ready to work 100 percent, starting right now!”

  Mr. Rogers asked, “Who will be in charge of writing the report?”

  A Mr. Hotz, who had been the editor of Aviation Week magazine, volunteered to do that.

  Then Mr. Rogers brought up another matter. “I’ve been in Washington a long time,” he said, “and there’s one thing you all must know: no matter what we do, there will always be leaks to the press. The best we can do is just try to minimize them. The proper way to deal with leaks is to have public meetings. We will have closed meetings, of course, but if we find anything important, we will have an open meeting right away, so the public will always know what is going on.”

  Mr. Rogers continued, “To start things off right with the press, our first official meeting will be a public meeting. We’ll meet tomorrow at 10 A.M.

  As we were leaving the get-together, I heard General Kutyna say, “Where’s the nearest Metro station?”

  I thought, “This guy, I’m gonna get along with him fine: he’s dressed so fancy, but inside, he’s straight. He’s not the kind of general who’s looking for his driver and his special car; he goes back to the Pentagon by the Metro.” Right away I liked him, and over the course of the commission I found my judgment in this case was excellent.

  The next morning, a limousine called for me—someone had arranged for us to arrive at our first official meeting in limousines. I sat in the front seat, next to the driver.

  On the way to the meeting, the driver says to me, “I understand a lot of important people are on this commission…”

  “Yeah, I s’pose…”

  “Well, I collect autographs,” he says. “Could you do me a favor?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I’m reaching for my pen when he says, “When we get there, could you point out to me which one Neil Armstrong is, so I can get his autograph?”

  Before the meeting started, we were sworn in. People were milling around; a secretary handed us each a badge with our picture on it so we could go anywhere in NASA. There were also some forms to sign, saying you agree to this and that so you can get your expenses paid, and so on.

  After we were sworn in, I met Bill Graham. I did recognize him, and remembered him as a nice guy.

  This first public meeting was going to be a general briefing and presentation by the big cheeses of NASA—Mr. Moore, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Lovingood, and others. We were seated in big leather chairs on a dais, and there were bright lights and TV cameras pointing at us every time we scratched our noses.

  I happened to sit next to General Kutyna. Just before the meeting started, he leans over and says, “Co-pilot to pilot: comb your hair.”

  I say, “Pilot to co-pilot: can I borrow your comb?”

  The first thing we had to learn was the crazy acronyms that NASA uses all over the place: “SRMs” are the solid rocket motors, which make up most of the “SRBs,” the solid rocket boosters. The “SSMEs” are the space shuttle main engines; they burn “LH” (liquid hydrogen) and “LOX” (liquid oxygen), which are stored in the “ET,” the external tank. Everything’s got letters.

  And not just the big things: practically every valve has an acronym, so they said, “We’ll give you a dictionary for the acronyms—it’s really very simple.” Simple, sure, but the dictionary is a great, big, fat book that you’ve gotta keep looking through for things like “HPFTP” (high-pressure fuel turbopump) and “HPOTP” (high-pressure oxygen turbopump).

  Then we learned about “bullets”—little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize

  STS 51-L CARGO ELEMENTS

  •

  TRACKING AND DATA RELAY SATELLITE-B/INERTIAL UPPER STAGE

  •

  SPARTAN-HALLEY/MISSION PECULIAR SUPPORT STRUCTURE

  •

  CREW COMPARTMENT

  - TISP - TEACHER IN SPACE PROGRAM

  - CHAMP - COMET HALLEY ACTIVE MONITORING PROGRAM

  - FDE - FLUID DYNAMICS EXPERIMENT

  - STUDENT EXPERIMENTS

  - RME - RADIATION MONITORING EXPERIMENT

  - PPE - PHASE PARTITIONING EXPERIMENT

  FIGURE 6. An example of “bullets.”

  things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on the slides.

  It turned out that apart from Mr. Rogers and Mr. Ache-son, who were lawyers, and Mr. Hotz, who was an editor, we all had degrees in science: General Kutyna had a degree from MIT; Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Covert, Mr. Rummel, and Mr. Sutter were all aeronautical engineers, while Ms. Ride, Mr. Walker, Mr. Wheelon, and I were all physicists. Most of us seemed to have done some preliminary work on our own. We kept asking questions that were much more technical than some of the big cheeses were prepared for.

  When one of them couldn’t answer a question, Mr. Rogers would reassure him that we understood he wasn’t expecting such detailed questions, and that we were satisfied, for the time being at least, by the perpetual answer, “We’ll get that information to you later.”

  The main thing I learned at that meeting was how inefficient a public inquiry is: most of the time, other people are asking questions you already know the answer to—or are not interested in—and you get so fogged out that you’re hardly listening when important points are being passed over.

  What a contrast to JPL, where I had been filled with all sorts of information very fast. On Wednesday we have a “get-together” in Mr. Rogers’ office—that takes two hours—and then we’ve got the rest of the day to do what? Nothing. And that night? Nothing. The next day, we have the public meeting—“We’ll get back to you on that”—which equals nothing! Although it looked like we were doing something every day in Washington, we were, in reality, sitting around doing nothing most of the time.

  That night I gave myself something to do: I wrote out the kinds of questions I thought we should ask during our investigation, and what topics we should study. My plan was to find out what the rest of the commission wanted to do, so we could divide up the work and get going.

  The next day, Friday, we had our first real meeting. By this time we had an office—we met in the Old Executive Office Building—and there was even a guy there to transcribe every word we said.

  Mr. Rogers was delayed for some reason, so while we waited for him, General Kutyna offered to tell us what an accident investigation is like. We thought that was a good idea, so he got up and explained to us how the air force had proceeded with its investigation of an unmanned Titan rocket which had failed.

  I was pleased to see that the system he described—what the questions were, and the way they went about finding the answers—was very much like what I had laid out the night before, except that it was much more methodical than I had envisioned. General Kutyna warned us that sometimes it looks like the cause is obvious, but when you investigate more carefully you have to change your mind. They had very few clues, and changed their minds three times in the case of the Titan.

  I’m all excited. I want to do this kind of investigation, and figure we can get started right away—all we have to do is decide who will do what.

  But Mr. Rogers, who came in partway through General Kutyna’s presentation, says, “Yes, your investigation was a great success, General, but we won’t be able to use your methods here because we can’t get as much information as you had.”

  Perhaps Mr. Rogers, who is not a technical man, did not realize how patently false that was. The Ti
tan, being an unmanned rocket, didn’t have anywhere near the number of check gadgets the shuttle did. We had television pictures showing a flame coming out the side of a booster rocket a few seconds before the explosion; all we could see in General Kutyna’s pictures of the Titan was a lousy dot in the sky—just a little, tiny flash—and he was able to figure stuff out from that.

  Mr. Rogers says, “I have arranged for us to go to Florida next Thursday. We’ll get a briefing there from NASA officials, and they’ll take us on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center.”

  I get this picture of the czarina coming to a Potemkin village: everything is all arranged; they show us how the rocket looks and how they put it together. It’s not the way to find out how things really are.

  Then Mr. Armstrong says, “We can’t expect to do a technical investigation like General Kutyna did.” This bothered me a lot, because the only things I pictured myself doing were technical! I didn’t know exactly what he meant: perhaps he was saying that all the technical lab work would be done by NASA.

  I began suggesting things I could do.

  While I’m in the middle of my list, a secretary comes in with a letter for Mr. Rogers to sign. In the interim, when I’ve just been shut up and I’m waiting to come back, various other commission members offer to work with me. Then Mr. Rogers looks up again to continue the meeting, but he calls on somebody else—as if he’s absentminded and forgot I’d been interrupted. So I have to get the floor again, but when I start my stuff again, another “accident” happens.

  In fact, Mr. Rogers brought the meeting to a close while I was in midstream! He repeated his worry that we’ll never really figure out what happened to the shuttle.