<VV> Viton at NASA - not much Corvair

[Tony Underwood]

At 08:48 PM 9/27/2009, Bryan Blackwell wrote:
>FYI, the SRBs certainly did use Viton, and Dr. Feynman famously demo'd
>that it's not elastic enough in below freezing temps, which the
>shuttle saw the night before the crash.  The crash has been pretty
>conclusively shown to have been caused by temperature related failure
>of the Viton o-rings coupled with flexing of the booster joints on
>liftoff.




Richard Feynman was one of my favorites... he had a unique way of 
going about doing things.   Ya gotta love his bongo drum habit and 
his unique and rather obscure viewpoint on life, science, the world.

He caused quite a stir during the Challenger followup discussions 
when he was invited to join the think tank and when the chunk of 
o-ring got passed around to the panel, each one looked at it and 
flexed it and noted how resilient it was, until Dr Feynman got 
it.   They stopped talking and watched as Dr Feynman deformed it and 
dunked it into his glass of ice water.    He withdrew it from the 
water and it remained deformed until it warmed back to room 
temp.    The group was not very noisy for the next few minutes...

Later on, Dr Feynman was uninvited to remain on the panel.   Seems 
they didn't much like what he'd had to tell them... in front of cameras.


"For a successful technology, common sense must take precedence over 
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."


I drank a figurative toast to that man when he died; we lost a true 
genius that day.



tony..