'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'

by Richard P Feynman

  I had wanted to talk with the assembly workers anyway (I love that kind of thing), so I arranged to see them the next day at 2:30 in the afternoon.

  At 2:30 I walk into this room, and there’s a long table with thirty or forty people—they’re all sitting there with morose faces, very serious, ready to talk to The Commissioner.

  I was terrified. I hadn’t realized my terrible power. I could see they were worried. They must have been told I was investigating the errors they had made!

  So right away I said, “I had nothin’ to do, so I thought I’d come over and talk to the guys who put the rockets together. I didn’t want everybody to stop working just ‘cause I wanna find out something for my own curiosity; I only wanted to talk with the workers…”

  Most of the people got up and left. Six or seven guys stayed—the crew who actually put the rocket sections together, their foreman, and some boss who was higher up in the system.

  Well, these guys were still a little bit scared. They didn’t really want to open up. The first thing I think to say is, “I have a question: when you measure the three diameters and all the diameters match, do the sections really fit together? It seems to me that you could have some bumps on one side and some flat areas directly across, so the three diameters would match, but the sections wouldn’t fit.”

  “Yes, yes!” they say. “We get bumps like that. We call them nipples.”

  The only woman there said, “It’s got nothing to do with me!”—and everybody laughed.

  “We get nipples all the time,” they continued. “We’ve been tryin’ to tell the supervisor about it, but we never get anywhere!”

  We were talking details, and that works wonders. I would ask questions based on what could happen theoretically, but to them it looked like I was a regular guy who knew about their technical problems. They loosened up very rapidly, and told me all kinds of ideas they had to improve things.

  For example, when they use the rounding machine, they have to put a rod through holes exactly opposite each other. There are 180 holes, so they have to make sure the other end of the rod goes through the hole 90 holes away. Now, it turns out you have to climb up into an awkward place to count the holes. It’s very slow and very difficult.

  They thought it would be very helpful if there were four paint marks, 90 degrees apart, put on at the factory. That way, they would never have to count more than 22 holes to the nearest mark. For example, if they put the rod through a hole which is 9 holes clockwise from a paint mark, then the other end of the rod would go through the hole which is 9 holes clockwise from the opposite mark.

  The foreman, Mr. Fichtel, said he wrote a memo with this suggestion to his superiors two years ago, but nothing had happened yet. When he asked why, he was told the suggestion was too expensive.

  “Too expensive to paint four little lines?” I said in disbelief.

  They all laughed. “It’s not the paint; it’s the paperwork,” Mr. Fichtel said. “They would have to revise all the manuals.”

  The assembly workers had other observations and suggestions. They were concerned that if two rocket sections scrape as they’re being put together, metal filings could get into the rubber seals and damage them. They even had some suggestions for redesigning the seal. Those suggestions weren’t very good, but the point is, the workers were thinking! I got the impression that they were not undisciplined; they were very interested in what they were doing, but they weren’t being given much encouragement. Nobody was paying much attention to them. It was remarkable that their morale was as high as it was under the circumstances.

  Then the workers began to talk to the boss who had stayed. “We’re disappointed by something,” one of them said. “When the commission was going to see the booster-rocket assembly, the demonstration was going to be done by the managers. Why wouldn’t you let us do it?”

  “We were afraid you’d be frightened by the commissioners and you wouldn’t want to do it.”

  “No, no,” said the workmen. “We think we do a good job, and we wanted to show what we do.”

  After that meeting, the boss took me to the cafeteria. As we were eating—the workmen weren’t with us anymore—he said, “I was surprised they were so concerned about that.”

  Later, I talked to Mr. Fichtel about this incident of increasing the pressure past 1200. He showed me the notes he made as he went along: they weren’t the formal papers that are stamped; they were part of an informal but carefully written diary.

  I said, “I hear the pressure got up to 1350.”

  “Yes,” he said, “we had tightened the nut at the other end.”

  “Was that the regular procedure?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “it’s in the book.”

  He opens up the manual and shows me the procedure. It says, “Build up the pressure on the hydraulic jack. If this is insufficient to obtain desired roundness, then very carefully tighten nut on other end to get to the desired roundness”—it said so in black and white! It didn’t say that tightening the nut would increase the pressure past 1200 psi; the people who wrote the manual probably weren’t quite aware of that.

  Mr. Fichtel had written in his diary, “We very carefully tightened the nut”—exactly the same language as the instructions.

  I said, “Mr. Lamberth told me he admonished you about going above 1200.”

  “He never admonished me about that—why should he?”

  We figured out what probably happened. Mr. Lamberth’s admonishment went down through the levels until somebody in middle management realized that Mr. Fichtel had gone by the book, and that the error was in the manual. But instead of telling Mr. Lamberth about the error, they simply threw away the admonishment, and just kept quiet.

  Over lunch, Mr. Fichtel told me about the inspection procedures. “There’s a sheet for each procedure, like this one for the rounding procedure,” he said. “On it there are boxes for stamps—one from the supervisor, one from quality control, one from the manufacturer, and for the bigger jobs, one from NASA.”

  He continued, “We make the measurements, go through one course of rounding, and then make the measurements again. If they don’t match well enough, we repeat the steps. Finally, when the diameter differences are small enough, we go for it.”

  I woke up. “What do you mean, ‘go for it’?” I said. “It sounds sort of cavalier…”

  “No, no,” he says. “That’s just the lingo we use when we mean that all the conditions are satisfied, and we’re ready to move to the next phase of the operation.”

  “Do you ever write that down—that ‘go for it’?”

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  “Let’s see if we can find a place where you wrote it.”

  Mr. Fichtel looked through his diary, and found an example. The expression was completely natural to him—it wasn’t reckless or cavalier; it was just his way of speaking.

  On Monday and Tuesday, while I was running around down at Kennedy, Mr. Rogers was in Washington appearing before a Senate committee. Congress was considering whether it should have its own investigation.

  Senator Hollings, from South Carolina, was giving Mr. Rogers a hard time: “Secretary Rogers,” he says, “I’m anxious that you have an adequate staff thayah. How many investigators does yo’ commission have?”

  Mr. Rogers says, “We don’t have investigators in the police sense. We’re reading documents, understanding what they mean, organizing hearings, talking to witnesses—that sort of thing. We’ll have an adequate staff, I assure you.”

  “Well, that’s the point,” Senator Hollings says. “From my experience in investigating cases, I’d want four or five investigators steeped in science and space technology going around down there at Canaveral talking to everybody, eating lunch with them. You’d be amazed, if you eat in the restaurants around there for two or three weeks, what you’ll find out. You can’t just sit and read what’s given to you.”

  “We’re not just going to sit and read,” Mr. Rogers says defensiv
ely. “We’ve gotten a lot of people in a room and asked them questions all at the same time, rather than have a gumshoe walking around, talking to people one at a time.”

  “I understand,” says Senator Hollings. “Yet I’m concerned about yo’ product if you don’t have some gumshoes. That’s the trouble with presidential commissions; I’ve been on ’em: they go on what’s fed to ’em, and they don’t look behind it. Then we end up with investigative reporters, people writing books, and everything else. People are still investigating the Warren Commission Report around this town.”*

  Mr. Rogers calmly says, “I appreciate your comments, Senator. You’ll be interested to know that one of our commission members—he’s a Nobel laureate—is down there in Florida today, investigating in the way you’d like him to investigate.”

  (Mr. Rogers didn’t know it, but I was actually eating lunch with some engineers when he said that!)

  Senator Hollings says, “I’m not questioning the competence of the Nobel laureate; I’ve been reading with great interest what he said. There’s no question about the competence of the commission itself. It’s just that when you investigate a case, you need investigators. You have already brought to the public’s attention a lot of very interesting facts, so I think you haven’t been negligent in any fashion.”

  So I saved Mr. Rogers a little bit. He saw that he had an answer for Mr. Hollings by the good luck that I stayed in Florida anyway, against his wishes!

  Fantastic Figures

  ON Tuesday afternoon I flew back to Washington, and went to the next meeting of the commission, on Wednesday. It was another public meeting. A manager of the Thiokol Company named Mr. Lund was testifying. On the night before the launch, Mr. Mulloy had told him to put on his “management hat” instead of his “engineering hat,” so he changed his opposition to launch and overruled his own engineers. I was asking him some harsh questions when suddenly I had this feeling of the Inquisition.

  Mr. Rogers had pointed out to us that we ought to be careful with these people, whose careers depend on us. He said, “We have all the advantages: we’re sitting up here; they’re sitting down there. They have to answer our questions; we don’t have to answer their questions.” Suddenly, all this came back to me and I felt terrible, and I couldn’t do it the next day. I went back to California for a few days, to recover.

  While I was in Pasadena, I went over to JPL and met with Jerry Solomon and Meemong Lee. They were studying the flame which appeared a few seconds before the main fuel tank exploded, and were able to bring out all kinds of details. (JPL has good enhancers of TV pictures from all their experience with planetary missions.) Later, I took the enhancements over to Charlie Stevenson and his crew at Kennedy to expedite things.

  Somewhere along the line, somebody from the staff brought me something to sign: it said that my expenses were so-and-so much, but they weren’t—they were more. I said, “This is not the amount I actually spent.”

  The guy said, “I know that, sir; you’re only allowed a maximum of $75 a day for the hotel and food.”

  “Then why did you guys set me up in a hotel which costs $80 or $90 a night, and then you give me only $75 a day?”

  “Yes, I agree; it’s too bad, but that’s the way it goes!”

  I thought of Mr. Rogers’ offer to put me in a “good hotel.” What did he mean by that—that it would cost me more?

  If you’re asked to contribute months of time and effort to the government (and you lose money you would have made consulting for a company), the government ought to appreciate it a little more than to be cheap about paying you back. I’m not trying to make money off the government, but I’m not wanting to lose money, either! I said, “I’m not going to sign this.”

  Mr. Rogers came over and promised he would straighten it out, so I signed the paper.

  I really think Mr. Rogers tried to fix it, but he was unable to. I thought of fighting this one to the end, but then I realized it’s impossible: if I had been paid for my actual expenses, then of course all the other commissioners would have to be paid, too. That would be all right, but it would also mean that this commission was the only commission to be paid its actual expenses—and pretty soon, word would get out.

  They have a saying in New York: “You can’t fight City Hall,” meaning “It’s impossible.” But this time, it was a hell of a lot bigger than City Hall: the $75 a day rule is a law of the United States! It might have been fun to fight it to the end, but I guess I was tired—I’m not as young as I used to be—so I just gave up.

  Somebody told me they heard commissioners make $1000 a day, but the truth is, our government doesn’t even pay their costs.

  At the beginning of March, about a month after the commission started, we finally split up into working groups: the Pre-Launch Activities group was headed by Mr. Ache-son; Mr. Sutter was in charge of the Design, Development, and Production panel; General Kutyna was leader of the Accident Analysis group; and Dr. Ride was in charge of the Mission Planning and Operations group.

  I spent most of my time in Kutyna’s group. I was in Ride’s group, too, but I ended up not doing very much for her.

  General Kutyna’s group went to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to do its work. The first thing that happened there was, a man named Ullian came in to tell us something. As range safety officer at Kennedy, Mr. Ullian had to decide whether to put destruct charges on the shuttle. (If a rocket goes out of control, the destruct charges enable it to be blown up into small bits. That’s much less perilous than a rocket flying around loose, ready to explode when it hits the ground.)

  Every unmanned rocket has these charges. Mr. Ullian told us that 5 out of 127 rockets that he looked at had failed—a rate of about 4 percent. He took that 4 percent and divided it by 4, because he assumed a manned flight would be safer than an unmanned one. He came out with about a 1 percent chance of failure, and that was enough to warrant the destruct charges.

  But NASA told Mr. Ullian that the probability of failure was more like 1 in 105.

  I tried to make sense out of that number. “Did you say 1 in 105?”

  “That’s right; 1 in 100,000.”

  “That means you could fly the shuttle every day for an average of 300 years between accidents—every day, one flight, for 300 years—which is obviously crazy!”

  “Yes, I know,” said Mr. Ullian. “I moved my number up to 1 in 1000 to answer all of NASA’s claims—that they were much more careful with manned flights, that the typical rocket isn’t a valid comparison, et cetera—and put the destruct charges on anyway.”

  But then a new problem came up: the Jupiter probe, Galileo, was going to use a power supply that runs on heat generated by radioactivity. If the shuttle carrying Galileo failed, radioactivity could be spread over a large area. So the argument continued: NASA kept saying 1 in 100,000 and Mr. Ullian kept saying 1 in 1000, at best.

  Mr. Ullian also told us about the problems he had in trying to talk to the man in charge, Mr. Kingsbury: he could get appointments with underlings, but he never could get through to Kingsbury and find out how NASA got its figure of 1 in 100,000. The details of the story I can’t remember exactly, but I thought Mr. Ullian was doing everything sensibly.

  Our panel supervised the tests that NASA was doing to discover the properties of the seals—how much pressure the putty could take, and so on—in order to find out exactly what had happened. General Kutyna didn’t want to jump to conclusions, so we went over and over things, checking all the evidence and seeing how well everything fitted together.

  There was an awful lot of detailed discussion about exactly what happened in the last few seconds of the flight, but I didn’t pay much attention to any of it. It was as though a train had crashed because the track had a gap in it, and we were analyzing which cars broke apart first, which cars broke apart second, and why some car turned over on its side. I figured once the train goes off the track, it doesn’t make any difference—it’s done. I became bored.


  So I made up a game for myself: “Imagine that something else had failed—the main engines, for instance—and we were making the same kind of intensive investigation as we are now: would we discover the same slipping safety criteria and lack of communication?”

  I thought I would do my standard thing—find out from the engineers how the engine works, what all the dangers are, what problems they’ve had, and everything else—and then, when I’m all loaded up so I know what I’m talking about, I’d confront whoever was claiming the probability of failure was 1 in 100,000.

  I asked to talk to a couple of engineers about the engines. The guy says, “Okay, I’ll fix it up. Is nine tomorrow morning okay?”

  This time there were three engineers, their boss, Mr. Lovingood, and a few assistants—about eight or nine people.

  Everybody had big, thick notebooks, full of papers, all nicely organized. On the front they said:

  REPORT ON MATERIAL GIVEN TO COMMISSIONER RICHARD P. FEYNMAN ON MARCH WA-WA,* 1986.

  I said, “Geez! You guys must have worked hard all night!”

  “No, it’s not so much work; we just put in the regular papers that we use all the time.”

  I said, “I just wanted to talk to a few engineers. There are so many problems to work on, I can’t expect you all to stay here and talk to me.”

  But this time, everybody stayed.

  Mr. Lovingood got up and began to explain everything to me in the usual NASA way, with charts and graphs which matched the information in my big book—all with bullets, of course.

  I won’t bother you with all the details, but I wanted to understand everything about the engine. So I kept asking my usual dumb-sounding questions.

  After a while, Mr. Lovingood says, “Dr. Feynman, we’ve been going for two hours, now. There are 123 pages, and we’ve only covered 20 so far.”

  My first reaction was to say, “Well, it isn’t really going to take such a long time. I’m always a little slow at the beginning; it takes me a while to catch on. We’ll be able to go much faster near the end.”