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There was also a good chance that the flight successfully would reach orbit. Then what?
by whycome 2y ago
There was also a good chance that the flight successfully would reach orbit. Then what?
- dogleash 2y agoThen they keep launching with lower strictness "because it worked last time" until something else fails. Feynman's section of the investigation report is basically the argument that's what was already happening at NASA and the O-rings were just the first thing to fail catastrophically.
- nordsieck 2y agoThat's exactly what happened with tile damage. The very first Shuttle flight - STS-1 experienced serious tile damage. And others (famously, the antenna mission) had similar experiences. But it wasn't until the Columbia disaster that anyone suffered for it.
- librasteve 2y agoas set out in the article there is a 1/1000,000 O ring related failure rate for the normal design and an unknown (but now know to be ~1/50) failure rate for the NASA specified design - should corporate / military entities risk life at 1 million to one ... that seems fair to me with the understanding of the crew - but it is definitely not good engineering practice (and is likely a criminal offence) to take an unknown risk with a human crew