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Subject:O-ringing, was RE: The Quick and the Bad From:"RUBOTTOM, AL" <ARUBOTTOM -at- SENSORMATIC -dot- COM> To:"'Chuck Martin'" <CMartin -at- serena -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 27 Apr 2000 10:20:06 -0700
[apologies to Eric; this isn't really waayy off-topic, just a tad marginal]
Cannot resist adding some clarification to O-ring hand-wringing...
even good ole R. Feynman gets (mis)credited with a putative solution.
In fact, it was a subtler but worse error in judgment.
For those who care, see below excerpts & links for The Whole Story!
It is the conventional wisdom of laymen that if you want a really great
engineer you get a scientist. For example, the presidential commission
investigating the Challenger disaster included the great theoretical
physicist Dr. Richard Feynman, but no engineers. As a result Dr. Feynman,
who never heard of O-rings before, was successfully misled in a cover-up and
the public never found out that the failure was due to engineering
negligence, a dimension error in the O-ring grooves and not to low
temperature.
[ from http://www.ljkamm.com/eng-sci.htm ]
interesting note WRT the O-ring debacle is the Tufte tie-in:
Charts are also high density tools but if they contain
"chartjunk"--unnecessary and confusing decoration or colors--they will
confuse and mislead. [Tufete's] Visual Explanations reproduces many of the
original Challenger O-ring charts. Tragically, the critical data was there
but not presented so that the causal relationship between variables was
apparent.
[ from http://www.llrx.com/columns/guide9.htm ]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chuck Martin [SMTP:CMartin -at- serena -dot- com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 9:34 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: RE: The Quick and the Bad
>
> > -----Original Message-----
...
> > blew up a
> > trillion dollar space ship because they forgot to swap out
> > the head gasket on a
> > rocket engine. Stupidity is more powerful than ISO 9001. All
> > their time and
> > processes still failed.
> >
> From the reports I read, the O-ring wasn't forgotten. Decision makers
> *did*
> have the information on hand about the temperature risk, but chose to
> ignore
> it because of other pressures, pressures to make the launch a success.
>
