So closes the appendix authored by Richard Feynman in the report of the commission on the Challenger disaster, and like BP, NASA was criticized for its lack of openness with the press.
The Challenger accident (and subsequent commission) parallel the current BP disaster in many ways, not the least of which is the failure of the rubber seal in the blowout protector.
The Challenger accident has frequently been used as a case study in the study of subjects such as engineering safety, the ethics of whistle-blowing, communications, group decision-making, and the dangers of groupthink.
Ronald Reagan appointed Richard Feynman to the Challenger Commission. His televised experiment dunking a section of O-Ring into ice water led to the truth of what caused that accident. Less well known is his criticism of the engineering process at NASA.
President Obama - Who on the BP Commission will be your Richard Feynman?
Like Obama's commission, Reagan formed The Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident to investigate a disaster. The commission members were Chairman William P. Rogers, Vice Chairman Neil Armstrong, David Acheson, Eugene Covert, Richard Feynman, Robert Hotz, Donald Kutyna, Sally Ride, Robert Rummel, Joseph Sutter, Arthur Walker, Albert Wheelon, and Chuck Yeager.
Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize winning physicist.
Despite attempts at controlling and even suppressing his activities on the Commission, Richard Feynman's televised experiment showing the effect of temperature on the elasticity of the O-ring by immersing it in ice water during the televised hearings led the charge to the truth.
Feynman later wrote about the investigation in his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think?. The second half of the book covers the investigation and the issues between science and politics.
The commission left a report that the BP engineers should have read.
Its report is part of the required readings for engineers seeking a professional license in Canada and other countries.
Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who had warned about the effect of cold weather on the O-rings, left his job at Morton Thiokol and became a speaker on workplace ethics. He argues that the caucus called by Morton Thiokol managers, which resulted in a recommendation to launch, "constituted the unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Sounds a little like the meeting where the BP staff intimidated the TransOcean people.
I would strongly recommend Feynman's personal appendix to this report as a worthwhile read as we watch yet another Presidential commission prepare to uncover the truth. It can be found at the following link
http://history.nasa.gov/...
For a short summary see The Role of Richard Feynman at the following link
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
I say again, President Obama -
Who's your Richard Feynman?