National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Rogers Commission, Appendix F: Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle (Richard Feynman)

Report · written 6 June 1986 · released 6 June 1986

Why this matters

Richard Feynman's dissent, attached to the Challenger accident report after he threatened to remove his name. He shows that NASA management put the risk of catastrophic failure at about 1 in 100,000 while its engineers estimated closer to 1 in 100. It ends: 'For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.'

Read the original

https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

Hosted by NASA History Office

Tags

Part of a collection · step 5 of 8

Space Program Post-Mortems

1986: 'nature cannot be fooled.'

Cite

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "Rogers Commission, Appendix F: Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle (Richard Feynman)." 6 June 1986. Released 6 June 1986. https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm (accessed via The Quiet Archive, QA-0037).

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