• FEBRUARY 10, 1986 SESSION.

  L. Michael Weeks and Irvin Davids.

  Lawrence B. Mulloy.

  Commission Administrative Matters.

   

Note:

Centered number = Hearing page

[bold number] = Text page.

Room 476

Old Executive Office Building

Washington, D. C.

The Commission met, pursuant to recess, at 2:10 o'clock p.m.

PRESENT:

WILLIAM P. ROGERS, Chairman

NEIL A. ARMSTRONG, Vice Chairman

BRIGADIER GENERAL CHARLES YEAGER

DR. SALLY RIDE

DR. ARTHUR WALKER

RICHARD FEYNMAN

DR. EUGENE COVERT

ROBERT HOTZ

DAVID C. ACHESON

MAJOR GENERAL DONALD KUTYNA

ALSO PRESENT:

JONATHAN THOMPSON, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

AL KEEL, Executive Director, Presidential Commission

WILLIAM G. GRAHAM, Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

PHILLIP CULBERTSON, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: If I may, I would like to call the meeting to order, please.

The first order of business is to welcome our new member, Chuck Yeager, who was not with us at our previous meetings because he was breaking another record, and I just wanted to say [244] how happy we are that he is here, and how pleased we are that he is a member of the Commission, and we would like to give him a hand.

(Applause.)

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: The second thing, Chuck tells me that he has to, because of previous commitments, he has to leave tonight and is going to be gone until when?

GENERAL YEAGER: When is the Commission ending?

(Laughter.)

GENERAL YEAGER: The 7th of March.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Anyway, we will look forward to your safe return and the opportunity to get together with you when you come back, and take part in the most crucial aspects of this investigation.

By way of preliminary comment, let me say that I have not had a chance to meet with all the members of

the Commission since the weekend developments. I talked to some of you on the phone, but we will have the opportunity to talk a little further in executive session about some of those developments and why we felt it was desirable to have this meeting, and why we felt it was desirable to have a public meeting.

And in that connection, I want to say that the public meeting was something I think that most of us felt we had to have, and I talked to Dr. Graham, who strongly supported that position. Otherwise I would have polled everybody on the Commission before we made the decision to hold a public meeting. But in view of the time pressures and in view of the fact that that is what we wanted, I felt it was quite appropriate to go ahead with this meeting.

So what we have asked for was the production of all the documents and records that relate to the matters that involve the seals, and we realize that it is not possible on such short notice to produce all of the documents, but I am sure that NASA has attempted to give us the key documents now, and Dr. Graham has agreed that he would give the Commission not only the documents that we have available, which will be supplemented by later documents, but also that he has here today and he will provide any further witnesses that you would like to discuss the matters that we are here to discuss.

I think it goes without saying that the article in the New York Times and other articles have created an unpleasant, unfortunate situation. There is no point in dwelling on the past. The important thing is to be sure that the Commission has all the appropriate documents and all the appropriate information. It may well be that we have all learned a lesson from this, that as much as possible we would hope that NASA and NASA's officials will volunteer any information in a frank and forthright manner. We don't want to be in a position that we have to ask for everything in advance.

This is not an adversarial procedure. This Commission is not in any way adversarial, and we hope that in the future, as much as it is humanly possible, when you think information has been developed that we should know about, that you will volunteer to give us that information.

And with that short statement, I would like to call on Dr. Graham to proceed and present whatever he would like to present on behalf of NASA.

And I might also say while he is taking the podium that he has cooperated fully with us, and we have

no reason to think that we will not get full cooperation from NASA.

DR. GRAHAM: Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Commission members.

As I said in the remarks opening NASA's presentation to the Commission last Thursday, that while NASA continues to analyze the system design and the data, you can be certain that NASA will provide you with full cooperation. That is NASA's policy and my personal position as well, and that continues to be NASA's policy, and will remain that way throughout the course of this investigation.

To help that process, I have put out the following internal memorandum today that I want you to be aware of. This is to the Associate Administrator for Space Flight, Jesse Moore, who is also the head of our Internal Design Review and Data Analysis Task Force, who has the overall responsibility within NASA and to me for the conduct of our work related to the Challenger. And it says all NASA testimony should be reviewed on a word-by-word basis by a knowledgeable NASA technical review team, and this refers to testimony which has already been presented to the Commission. Should any error, partial or incomplete statement or potentially misleading statement be found, an amendment to the

testimony should be filed in order to clarify the issue of concern.

And so I want you to know that in addition to trying to give you as timely and complete a volume of information as we can during our testimony, we realize that it is possible for NASA to occasionally misspeak or to delete something inadvertently, and should that occur, we will in any case be going back over the testimony and looking at it and checking it. As soon as we find something that appears to be-to warrant an amendment to the testimony or a clarification or an addition to the testimony, we will provide that to you.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: We are going to have a little atmospheric problem here, and so I don't want to interrupt you.

Let's see if we can get it a little cooler.

(Pause.)

DR. GRAHAM: Mr. Chairman, NASA hereby formally submits to you all of the reports, memoranda, briefing charts and other material that we have been able to locate to date concerning issues associated with the integrity of the SRB segment seals and other things related to that part of the solid rocket performance, and assembly and operation.

And I would now transfer to you, the Commission, the

material. We will continue to search for such material. As we find it, on an incremental basis we will transmit it to you through our channels of liaison and make sure that it is called to your attention.

From this point forward, I intend to turn the conduct of the NASA presentation over to Mr. Moore. But before I do, I thought I would be willing to entertain any questions you have.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: When did you first hear of the possibility of the story by the New York Times?

DR. GRAHAM: Mr. Chairman, I first heard of that at approximately 1:40 p.m. yesterday- Saturday.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: And what did you do at that time?

DR. GRAHAM: At that time I called you to make you aware of the general subject that was being addressed and the possibility of a story from the New York Times, and that certain documents [246] appeared to be in their hands, and I also informed others within the administration that this material apparently had come into the possession of the New York Times and had the possibility of the story going forward.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Have you since determined whether any previous work had been done by NASA in

connection with the preparation of the story or preparing a reply to the story?

DR. GRAHAM: I believe there was an awareness, at least earlier that same day within NASA, of the story, because it was brought to me by NASA employees. There was some thought given as to how to respond to it, but no response was transmitted outside NASA at that time because it seemed appropriate that the Commission be aware of the subject before a public response was put forward.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: So that my question is not misunderstood, I want to make it clear that obviously you can't report to the Commission every time that some newspaper is going to write a story. We wouldn't expect that. On the other hand, there are certain types of investigations which you may be aware of that seem to have particular significance, and in such event, we would hope that you would, and members of NASA would immediately let us know about it so that it didn't appear that we were taken by surprise.

Do you agree with that?

DR. GRAHAM: Very much so, Mr. Chairman. I am in complete agreement with that policy, and I have transmitted that policy to the NASA staff both before last Saturday and since last Saturday.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Furthermore, I want to make it clear, speaking for myself, that we don't want to react to every newspaper story because it is inevitable there will be a lot of them, and a lot of them will be unfair and unfriendly.

I guess what concerns me a little bit about it, and I hope we don't have any further discussion publicly about it, is that this seemed to go right to the heart of the matter, and it seemed to be related to the plume that was started and shown to the public, and it occurred to us that there must have been a good deal of thought in NASA about how serious a story it would be if it appeared, and therefore I would have thought that there would have been an eagerness to present it to the Commission on Thursday, and particularly on Friday, in the private session.

But with no further ado, go ahead.

DR. GRAHAM: Yes, sir. I share your view of that, and I think that further discussion addressing that issue will be given to you today.

DR. WALKER: Is any of this material specifically classified?

DR. GRAHAM: Let me ask the people who compiled it all.

Is any of this package, have you identified

any material that is classified related to this subject that isn't in the package?

MR. MOORE: No.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: In that connection, it would be helpful to be sure that any time we are given classified information, that it is made clear to us that it is classified because otherwise we will treat it as if it is not.

MR. ACHESON: Could I ask a question?

[247] In the Washington Post story on Sunday, a number of theories of the accident were expounded and illustrated in that story, and whether or not any of these are probable, I assume one or more pay have associated internal correspondence, and I would like to suggest that that be submitted to this Commission in advance of any similar publicity occurrence as that of last Sunday.

DR. GRAHAM: I have also asked that NASA staff pull together all of the information that may exist in our files related to any failure modes of the SRBs and make sure that is available first to me, but very quickly then transmitted to the Commission. That subject can be enlarged even further to the extent of the tank and the orbiter itself and the ground support equipment, and if you wish, we will try to do that.

I think that we will need to realize that there will be a large volume of engineering information, concerns and issues and so on, that it may take a little bit of time to pull that together in any complete way, and there probably will be a substantial volume of information as there has to be in any complex program such as this, a constant ebb and flow of engineering design checks, information, background and so on, such as this, and I strongly agree with the Chairman that this is a particularly pertinent one and very much to the issue now.

We will continue to pull that information together across the entire system and continue to provide it to the Commission. And with your concurrence, I would like to do that in the order, SRB first, expendable tanks second, and the orbiter third, and then ground support equipment and related matters fourth, subject only to particular issues that seem to arise that might put us off the track.

(Material deleted.)

We will certainly do that, and you will have that within the day.

In fact, this information is information we need to collect internally in the course of our own analyses and review, and so this operation does not constitute a major interference. In fact, it is complementary with what we are doing, and we would certainly do it in any case, and we are pleased to provide it to you.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Very well.

DR. GRAHAM: Thank you very much.

Mr. Moore?

MR. MOORE: Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission, the data that you have before you here is data that we immediately started collecting sometime last week in preparation for the briefing of the Commission on this coming Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center. It was our intention to review that data with you at that time, as well as status reports on the data on all other areas.

Let me say up front that we are looking at all areas of the 51-L incident. We are looking at the tank, the SRB and the orbiter and so forth, and anything that we judge sensitive on those [248] areas we will try to clearly make it available to the Commission prior to any data that we would want to present, and so forth. We will honor Dr. Graham's request to provide that, to the best of our knowledge.

One of the things we would also like to state for the Commission is that much discussion as you have doubtless heard over the weekend about O-rings has appeared in the paper. I would like to say that O-ring erosion, which we are going to address today, is only one of several areas that we are looking at for possible scenarios, anomalous scenarios. There have been some

concerns on the O-rings. We are going to try to relate that to you today. We will provide you with any additional information that we have in our hands to support that, plus any other things.

We are looking at a lot of additional areas in addition to the O-rings. As I say, there is a lot of additional data on flight readiness reviews. We could probably stack several feet of documents on you in terms of this Commission. What we have tried to do is to excerpt some of those documents, the most relevant pieces of information here today, and as the Commission has additional questions or needs additional information, we would be glad to do our best to provide that.

I would like to do two things here, if I might. I would like to first quickly review for you the agenda that we prepared.

(Viewgraph.)

MR. MOORE: I trust everybody in the back can see this as well.

I am following Dr. Graham's introductory remarks. I'm planning to just give you kind of an overview of setting the stage of this whole activity, and I particularly wanted you and the Commission members to meet the people, some of the people that are involved

in the Shuttle projects, and in particular, the solid rocket booster project, not only here in my office in Washington but also at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and also several members of Morton-Thiokol who are here as well, that handle the solid rocket booster project, and we would again welcome any questions that you or the members of the Commission may have on the booster activities as we go forward.

Mike Weeks is a deputy in my office at NASA headquarters. He is the Deputy Associate Administrator with emphasis on the word "technical." Mike has been in the program for some time, since about 1979, and is very familiar with the elements of the Shuttle program.

Let me introduce Mike Weeks right here.

Then Mike will also provide for the Commission documentation that we have at NASA headquarters and some concerns that we have had over a period of time on the solid rocket motor, and in particular, on the O-rings.

Then we have also asked Larry Mulloy-and Larry, would you stand up, please? He is right here-who is the Manager of the solid rocket booster project at the Marshall Space Flight Center, to go through some technical areas with you today to give you some historical data on the solid rocket booster and some of

the performances that we have seen out of the SRB in the course of the Shuttle program.

And finally, I will have a few closing remarks, and one item that I will want to discuss here with you this afternoon, Mr. Chairman and other members, is our participation at tomorrow's session. If you can give us some insight into that, I would appreciate it.

[249] Let me also say before I turn this over to Mike, let me introduce some of the other people that are here.

I would like to introduce Mr. Bill Hamby, Mr. William H. Hamby. He is the Deputy Director of STS Program Integration in my office at NASA headquarters.

I would like to introduce Mr. David Winterhalter. David is the Director of Shuttle Propulsion in my office in Washington.

And I would like to introduce Irving Davids. He is with the Shuttle Propulsion division.

I would like to introduce Paul Wetzel, who is the Chief of the Solid Rocket Booster Programs at NASA headquarters.

And I would also like to introduce Paul Herr. He is in the Shuttle Propulsion Division at NASA headquarters.

And finally, with NASA, I would like to

introduce Russell Bardos, who is the Manager of Productivity Operations Support, also at NASA headquarters.

These are, in effect, a large percentage of my staff that are working in this particular area. And so I thought if you or other members of the Commission would like to ask them questions directly, we would certainly be happy to try to answer any questions the Commission has.

In addition, I have invited Dr. William Lucas, Director of Marshall Space Flight Center here today, who has responsibility for all propulsion elements on the Shuttle program.

I have introduced Larry Mulloy previously.

I would like to introduce Larry Wear now of the Marshall Space Flight Center. Larry is involved in the solid rocket motor project at Marshall. And I would like to introduce John McCarty, who is Deputy Director of Structures in the Propulsion Lab at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Now, we have four people here from Morton-Thiokol Corporation in Utah, and I would like to introduce Allen McDonald, who is the Director of the Solid Rocket Motor Project at Thiokol; and I would like to introduce Mark Salita, who is a scientist in the Gas

Dynamics Section of Morton-Thiokol; and I would also like to introduce Donald Ketner, who is the Supervisor of the Gas Dynamics Section at Morton-Thiokol; and representing the Washington office here of Morton-Thiokol is Frank Ross.

Now, that completes the number of people that I brought here today, and with your permission, Mr. Commissioner, we will proceed with the presentation of the information that we have brought.

And I would now like to introduce Mike Weeks.

MR. WEEKS: I put this briefing together, gentlemen and members, to address first the New York Times article, and there are six documents that obviously were provided to that news media, and first I want to go through those and bring you up to speed on that. [Ref. 2/10-1]

(Viewgraph.) [Ref. 2/10-2]

MR. WEEKS: And then I will go to this chronology of things that have happened on the O-ring problem since we first ran into it. And the first time we really addressed that was way back in 1980, and I will show you that and bring you up to date.

(Viewgraph.) [Ref. 2/10-3]

MR. WEEKS: As was spoken to, and it is in your document there, the first one is the Cook memorandum, and that is a memorandum that was written on the 23rd of July, and it was prepared by the financial analysts over in the Financial Department, and the person is a financial type person and not too knowledgeable of the whole program situation. [Ref. 2/10-4]

I am going along now at page 6. I am right here (indicating) at page 6, and I guess I would suggest to you that that is a less clinical analysis of

this whole situation because the young chap came aboard about the first of July and was just picking up things in a hallway, and wrote this to his immediate superior.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Is he here today?

MR. WEEKS: No, he is not.

MR. MOORE: We could bring him, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: We didn't expect him. I was just asking. He is still employed by NASA?

MR. WEEKS: Yes, he is.

DR. COVERT: This stuff you call putty, that might be an unfortunate choice of terms. It is really an inhibitor, isn't it? The heat burning from that at the joint might fit together perfectly.

MR. WEEKS: Dr. Lucas ought to handle that.

DR. COVERT: It is zinc chromate, isn't it?

DR. LUCAS: It is a zinc chromate, but it is not in an inhibitor that goes on the end of the train. It is separate from that. I think Larry Mulloy will demonstrate that for you.

MR. WEEKS: Now, the next one, Mr. Chairman and Committee, is a memo dated the 17th of July by Irv Davids over here, who I guess we gave him his 35-year pin some time ago, and he is very senior and very careful, and this is No. 2 up there. [Ref. 2/10-5]

DR. COVERT: Is it true that he changed this stuff, as Cook said, from being a sealant that has asbestos in it to being a sealant without asbestos?

[251] MR. WEEKS: No, I believe we still have asbestos in the system, and we eventually have to get

rid of that, and that is one of our longer term plans. But we aren't concentrating on that today. We are concentrating on O-rings.

DR. COVERT: You are concentrating on-the material that was used in this particular set of boosters was the old material and made by the old manufacturer?

MR. WEEKS: No. This is the second generation because the original vendor, and I have forgotten his name, went out of business, and we had to go to a Randolph type of one.

DR. COVERT: How many firings have you had with the new material?

MR. MULLOY: It was introduced on STS-8.

DR. COVERT: So it is about 17.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Mike, let me ask you, we used this same type of material on the Titan.

Did you change manufacturers also on the Titan?

MR. MULLOY: I do not know.

MR. WEAR: The one on the Titan is an Inmont putty, and--

MR. WEEKS: So we do not fly the Inmont putty?

MR. WEAR: No.

DR. WALKER: Is the putty supposed to be the

primary or backup seal?

MR. MULLOY: The putty is a thermal barrier, not a sealer.

MR. WEEKS: The pressure goes through the putty and gets down through the exterior of the case, and therefore that pressure of the 1000 psi in the chamber motor does go down to the 0-ring.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Just so you don't go too fast, let's focus up for a moment on the Cook Memorandum.

As I understand it, you are saying that he was just hired and was in a department where he really didn't have much knowledge of what was going on?

MR. WEEKS: I would believe that you should discount this to a fairly great extent because as you will see in the next memorandum of Mr. Irv Davids, who has been with our program for at least a decade, and is 30 years with the Agency, it is a very careful and thoughtful response to his memo. His memo was created because we had a failure in April of 1985 in which it is the first time in all of the program that we had the secondary seal have any difficulty, and the only time, whereas the other erosions were all in the primary seal, the primary being the one that first sees the pressure, and the secondary being the one that is backing it up,

if you will.

DR. RIDE: Which flight was that?

MR. WEEKS: That was 51-B.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Mike, you did not have charring of the secondary seal on 51

MR. WEAR: No.

MR. WEEKS: It was 51-D.

DR. RIDE: Did you see a problem with the primary seal on 51-C?

[252] MR. WEAR: We had some erosion on the primary seal in the K joint on 51-C. I will cover all of this later.

DR. COVERT: Did you have the same gel thickness on 51-B, C and so on?

MR. WEEKS: I believe all of these are the thinner steel casings. We started and had the first early flights with the thicker steel casings, but I believe all of the recent flights are thinner casings, and I guess they do get mixed, General.

GENERAL KUTYNA: They do get mixed. We try to use them whenever we can.

MR. HOTZ: Mr. Weeks, could you tell us whether there are any errors of fact in this memo, and if so, would you point them out?

MR. WEEKS: Which one?

MR. HOTZ: The first memo, the Cook memo.

MR. WEEKS: Could you help me out on that, Herb?

MR. MOORE: We can get Mr. Cook here if you

would like, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Yes, we would like that, but let's just go ahead.

MR. MOORE: We will get an answer to that.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Just so we understand. I think Mr. Hotz and I asked the same questions. All right. This says: You have asked us or me to investigate reported problems, and then he says, discussions with program engineers show that these are potentially major problems affecting both flight safety and progress cost.

My question is, is what he set forth there accurate, and didn't he talk to the engineers and deduce this information? Isn't this information he got from the engineers?

MR. WEEKS: I think that his statement in here where he says that it might be catastrophic I think is overstated.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Well, that may be.

MR. MOORE: I think the best thing for us to do, Mr. Chairman, is to think about getting Mr. Cook here, and then we can ask Mr. Cook to sit down and try to answer your questions on this thing.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Yes, but we want to ask questions as we go along--

MR. HOTZ: We would also like your opinion of whether this is accurate or not. We can get a witness--

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: This is a case where you are saying, in effect, that you didn't have much confidence in this fellow because he was in the wrong department and had been there just a short time, and so we are asking is the material that he reported on accurate?

MR. WEEKS: If I may, I would like to pore over every word and come back to you.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Well, is it substantially accurate?

MR. WEEKS: I think it is substantially accurate.

DR. COVERT: I think the other thing, Mike, when you go through it, try to go through it from the point of view of a rather naive sort of guy who hears the words and doesn't necessarily understand all of the nuances but gets an overall picture of things. It has been my experience that sometimes people have amazing insight. Part of the problem is to understand the nuances. Thank you.

MR. WEEKS: Now, if we could go on to Irv Davids' memo, which is on page No. 9, and he is discussing there the two cases, the nozzle-to-case, which is at the back end of the booster, and the case-to-case, which there are three of those joints

along the length of it, and the one up from the bottom is the suspicious one in the movies of 51L.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Now, it looks to me as if this document preceded the Cook document, is that correct?

MR. WEEKS: It did, yes.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: So this was not in response to what Mr. Cook wrote.

MR. WEEKS: That's right. This memo was written under the following circumstances. We have the secondary erosion on the flight of the 29th of April, and we asked Mr. Davids and Mr. Hamby to go to Marshall to review it because we were concerned about this being the first case of any erosion on the secondary seal. And that was a fairly small number of .032 inch in that particular case on the secondary seal on the nozzle-to-case joint.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Let us take this a glance at a time.

MR. MOORE: Mike, you might point out that Mr. Davids is here.

MR. WEEKS: Yes, he is here.

DR. COVERT: When you say heat affected, was it discolored?

MR. DAVIDS: Yes.

I would like to just mention that when we went down there, the secondary seal failure that we experienced, or erosion, was at the nozzle-to-case interface and not just the case-to-case.

THE CLERK: I'm sorry, Mr. David, you will have to speak up, please.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Excuse me. Would you want to swear the witness in, please?

And this is what we do for all witnesses. This is nothing personal.

THE CLERK: Do you swear the testimony you will give this Commission will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

MR. DAVIDS: I do.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: This gentleman is a court stenographer, and he has to record what you are saying. So if you could speak a little louder, please.

MR. DAVIDS: I just wanted you to understand that the secondary seal that Mike was alluding to, with the type of erosion that we had was at the case-to-the-nozzle interface and not the case-to-case. That is significant to what we are talking about.

However, when we got that problem due to the

fact that it was a secondary seal, we thought we had better go down to Marshall and go through the entire area of seals to see what we were doing and what kind of problem we were having, and that is what initiated our visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center. And you will note from the memorandum that we did point out that there was certain-that we did experience some O-ring erosion of the primary O-ring on the case-to-case seals, and the nozzle-to-case seals. And what I wanted to do was obtain all the data that was available so we had a pretty good history of what kind of failure or erosion we were getting on the seals and make sure that all of this data was brought up to top management so that we all were well aware of what the problem was that existed, and we would try to get some pressure to accelerate trying to think about what we could do about clearing up this potential problem that we had, and that was the real intent of why we went down to Marshall.

[254] CHAIRMAN ROGERS: What is the pleasure of the Commission? Would you like to ask Mr. Davids some questions about this memorandum now, or would you want to come back and ask him questions later?

MR. ACHESON: I would like to ask one.

This memorandum refers in the B heading on page 2 to unseating of the secondary O-ring during joint rotation.

Is there a measurement of joint rotation made during flight?

MR. DAVIDS: There is no measurement taken, but Mr. Mulloy in his presentation is going to cover that area very specifically. We actually have a joint to show you what the joint rotation is all about, but we have no measurable measurement at all of that.

MR. WEEKS: Not in flight, but as he will show you it has been measured on the ground a couple of times in full scale motors.

DR. COVERT: The suit blow-bye, is that case to case, or case to nozzle?

MR. DAVIDS: That was two cases by the primary seals. If you look at my memo, you will find that the first part of it is just nozzle to case, and the second part of it is case to case. So I specifically separate the two.

DR. WALKER: Do you have a thermal model of what temperatures different parts of the assemblies see, and do you have any measurements of temperature of the various parts such as during firing, etc.?

MR. DAVIDS: I assume we have that.

MR. MULLOY: We do have a thermal model that shows some gradients of temperature, including the motor through the propellant through the

insulation, through the liner, into the case.

DR. WALKER: Could we have a copy of that?

MR. MULLOY: We can show you some results, yes, sir.

DR. WALKER: You have measurements, too?

MR. MULLOY: No, we do not have any direct temperature measurements.

MR. WEEKS: I am sorry, but I thought we measured some on the static firing out at Morton-Thiokol's factory. We have had many static tests. The static test is a single motor that is fired on the ground horizontally, and I thought we measured a number of temperatures during those early development cases.

Didn't we measure the temperature on the outside?

Well, we will dig into that.

MR. MOORE: Mr. Walker, we will provide you the data on thermal models as well as actual measurements that have been made.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Mike, this letter by Mr. Davids says the prime suspect is the type of putty used, and he notes that you changed manufacturers after STS-10, yet there was erosion way back in 1980, well before this change in putty on STS-10.

So how do you tie the erosion to the change in manufacturer of the putty if you had that problem before?

MR. DAVIDS: I think Larry will clarify this. If you look at all of the O-ring erosion that we have seen, you find you can actually follow a path through the putty that goes to the spot where [255] the O-ring erosion occurs. And so it is obvious that you are getting some blow-by through that putty to the point where the erosion occurs, and so you see a clear trace between the erosion and the putty itself.

Now, your question about why we didn't have it on STS-10, I guess my answer would be that we don't have erosion on every flight. There are times when we don't have it and times we did have it.

GENERAL KUTYNA: No, I misstated my question or you misunderstood.

You had erosion prior to changing this putty. Therefore, you had these blow holes or whatever you call them, through the old putty, which you claim was good putty, and now you are saying that after STS-10 you changed putty and therefore you had a problem.

Did you have it beforehand? Is that not true?

MR. DAVIDS: I guess that is true.

MR. WEEKS: You are reading where putty is the

prime cause of the erosion, General?

GENERAL KUTYNA: Yes. And I am asking, you had this problem as early as 1980, well before this time, well before the time you changed manufacturers.

DR. COVERT: When you say you received these things, I assume that when it comes back after it is hauled out of the ocean, and this comes from disassembly and refurbishment--

MR. DAVIDS: That is correct.

DR. COVERT: - and you take it apart very carefully to make sure that you don't interfere with anything of the visual data?

MR. DAVIDS: That is correct.

MR. WEEKS: In fact, that is, of course, one of the neat things about the Shuttle is this is the first time in history we have been bringing these things back. The Titan, of course, the only thing we can look at there on erosion is the firings they have had on the ground.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Do you happen to know whether there is any connection between these two memoranda, or did they just happen to be about the same time?

MR. DAVIDS: I didn't know anything about the Cook memorandum. I had never seen the Cook memorandum.

MR. WEEKS: The only connection is that in the New York Times article I elected to put them in the order of their occurrence in the article as just a way of formatting this. [Ref. 2/10-6]

Number one, as you will see in there, it shows up in the article on the second page in your handout up at the top where Mr. Cook, down about the middle of the second page is Roman number II which is Irv Davids' memo, and number III is the budget briefing that is spoken to on August 21 and then September 10 shows one of mine, which is the Propulsion Division of Mr. Winterhalter's internal preparation, preparing to come to Jess Moore, which is the next one.

The way we organize every month in the office is that we get the financial data, and then each division, the Propulsion Division, the Orbiter Division, etc., prepare their charts in their own house, and then it is brought to Jess Moore, and then after that we carry it to the Administrator, which is the final thing around the 17th, 18th of the month. And so we go through this ritual every month of how we do this thing. [Ref. 2/10-7]

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Let me go back just one moment to the Cook memorandum. You will notice at the end of that he ties safety to budgetary considerations.

He said I would think that any NASA budget submitted this year for fiscal year 1987 and beyond should certainly be based on a reliable judgment as to the cause of the SRB seal problem and a corresponding decision as to budgetary action needed to provide for its solution.

Do you know whether any such action was taken or consideration was given to his memorandum on that point?

MR. WEEKS: I can state authoritatively that no action-I think this is true of Mr. Moore as well, because I didn't see this memorandum until yesterday.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Do you know whether anybody else took it seriously then?

MR. WEEKS: We certainly were alert, as you will see as we go through this whole chronology, you will see that we were alert to a problem, but we had not identified a precise amount of money that we thought would be required to fix it.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: In other words, as I understand it, your memorandum was, as far as you knew, unrelated to anything in the Cook memorandum, so you were just considering the facts that you were dealing with here based upon what had happened in previous flights, and you were making a study of that, and you

were reporting on it, and you end up with I recommend that we arrange for MSFC to provide an overall briefing to you on the O-rings, including failure history, current status, and options for correcting the problems.

Now, I assume that was done, wasn't it?

MR. WEEKS: Yes. That is, as you will see, in the next set of charts that that occurred on the 19th of August.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Now as far as we know from this book, was any follow-up given to the Cook memorandum?

MR. MOORE: Sir, may I comment on the Cook memorandum?

Mr. Cook is in our budget office at NASA headquarters. He is in the Comptroller's office, and that is where you see the BRC. That is a code.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: I understood that.

MR. MOORE: Now, he wrote this internally to one of the people in the budget office. Mike Mann works in the budget office, and Mike Mann is one of our people who looks after the overall Shuttle budget. To my knowledge, no one in my office, at least in the technical program area here, saw this memo from Mr. Cook.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Is Mr. Mann here today?

MR. MOORE: Mr. Mann is in the budget office.

He is not here today. We would be happy to bring him, too.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: But as of now, we don't know if he did anything about this? He just treated it as another memorandum?

MR. MOORE: We do not. We are all seeing this for the first time.

I guess we saw it in the newspaper, just like you and other members of the Commission.

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Am I correct in assuming that what you describe, that in the normal chain of authority, neither Mr. Cook nor Mr. Mann would have anything to do with deciding the technical aspects?

MR. MOORE: Mr. Armstrong, you are exactly right. They are budget analysts, and we at this time of the year are putting together our budget briefing for the Administrator for fiscal [257] 1987, and I am sure the Code B people, our people that you see listed here, are sitting back and looking at areas that they ought to be sensitive to when we come before the Administrator with our budget.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Let me say I fully understand that, but we want to be sure that we face the facts. The fact is you have a memorandum, and Cook says certain things he thinks should be done.

All I want to do is find out what was done. If

it wasn't done, tell us why and we will understand and the record will be clear. That's all.

MR. MOORE: We will have to bring in Mr. Mann and Mr. Cook I think to make sure of that, or we can provide you a written statement.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: No, we would like to have them.

MR. MOORE: Mr. Winterhalter, do you want to talk about this?

MR. WINTERHALTER: Yes. The very next document, document No. 3, will show that in our budget briefing we referred to the O-ring as a budget threat. We did not specifically add any money to the budget for that but understood that we were studying the situation, that depending if some redesign and some improvement was decided upon, then we would have to have some extra money to cover that outside what we had originally budgeted.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Are we going to find out through these papers that you as a matter of jargon, you spoke about budget threat and safety together and related them somehow together?

MR. WINTERHALTER: Not in anything that I have learned.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: You just spoke about budget

threat.

MR. WINTERHALTER: We didn't look at that as a safety problem.

MR. MOORE: We identify a budget threat as something that the results of tests or the results of flight may require us to go back and make some changes in it, and so therefore, for the fiscal '87 budget which we were putting together, we identified this area as an area of threat based upon the tests that we had planned on the segments which you will hear about later on in this briefing, and that was the context of the budget threat.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Just so we understand it, because this is something that the press will clearly dwell on, I gather you mean when you say budget threat, that if you change conditions to approve whatever it was that you were talking about, that would increase your budget, and therefore it would be a threat to the budget.

Now, doesn't that necessarily relate to the safety of the personnel involved, and that leads to budget considerations?

MR. CULBERTSON: Dr. Graham asked me to sit in a while in his absence.

Let me define what budget threat means within the Agency: anything that could affect current

projections on the budget is referred to as a budget threat. We ask each of the programs when they submit the budget to do it as realistically as they can but also tell us where that budget may be in error, what kinds of things it can cause. It can range from DOD deciding not to fly a mission on the Shuttle and therefore change our income. It can come from any kind of action, including the results of tests which haven't yet been made, and it can certainly be based upon [258] somebody's concern that there may be a safety item that could affect our planning and could therefore affect our budget.

The word "threat" is an unfortunate word, but it is what we use, and it is a potential item that may change the budget.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: So we are likely to find as we study these documents that from time to time when there seems to be a failure of equipment or something that should be improved, that it may be referred to as a budget threat, and therefore nothing should be done about it?

MR. CULBERTSON: No, not that nothing should be done about it.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Well, let me correct that.

By the use of the term and relating it to, as

you did in this case, or as Cook did in his memo where he makes it very clear that that is what he is thinking about, it may appear that from time to time that things were not done in the field of safety because that would present a budget threat. I mean, it just seems to me it is clear, and I understand it, but it seems to me it is clear, it is clear from this memo, the first one you have here.

MR. FEYNMAN: Suppose there is an item which may or may not turn out to be a safety threat, and there is some kind of difficulty, and it may be solved very easily. On the other hand, it may require a large amount of reconstruction of equipment which is quite expensive, and it is not yet known whether it is an important problem either for safety or for anything else, and it is nevertheless potentially a problem, and a problem that the budget has to appreciate may arise. It doesn't mean that they have decided that they are not going to make this change. As a matter of fact, the very fact that they are aware that the budget is going to be threatened represents a statement of the possibility that they will have to repair this for safety purposes, and there may not be an obvious relationship between safety and the budget.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Well, as I say-and I don't think there is any point of having a further discussion on it, but I think we can see that the way

these documents are written would suggest that, and I think that that is something that you would want to think about before we come to a public session because it says so. It says-well, the last paragraph, I don't have to read it. It says there are certain safety problems. My engineers tell me there are safety problems. You have asked me to make a check, and then he says we have got to consider the budget action needed to provide for the solution.

So I think there is no point of saying that you haven't thought about it. I mean, as Dr. Feynman says, it may very well, the documents would reflect that you did give full consideration and you decided that it didn't have to be fixed. I understand that.

But the phrase "budget threat" is very unfortunate.

MR. CULBERTSON: We do not use it as an indication that budget limitations threaten the possibility of taking corrective action. I don't know that it is every really used in that way in NASA, but you certainly can read that connotation into it.

MR. WEEKS: I want to make two points in this regard. In the manned programs, as I know them, through their history, the people making those decisions first look at if it is safety and it is mandatory, we find a way

in the budget to get it done.

[259] Now, in our budget that Mr. Moore carries across to the Administrator, we have two ways of taking care of things like this. We have changes in upgrading that we can absorb some of these and we also have a reserve account. In NASA it is called a PA. It is program activity to be allowed for. And so there are ways.

And when we have over the six years I have been here in the program, when we find a genuine safety issue, and we do quite often, we find the money, and have in the six years I have been there, are able to some how, in some way change other things to fit and get the safety not compromised. I cannot think of a case that we have ever said that we will not fix a safety item because of money. Sometimes it has been rather excruciating.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Mr. Chairman, along your line of reasoning, I would ask Phil, might there be some unfortunate choice of words here that ties safety to schedule threat also?

MR. CULBERTSON: Well, it could be used that way.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Are there some you are aware of in your research of the documents, because those

could be misinterpreted.

MR. CULBERTSON: The way we use schedule threats as to the schedules is the same way we use budget threat for the budget, and nothing further is inferred. The budget people worry about threats to budget; schedule people worry about threats to schedule. The program worries about the overall quality of it.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Because we are going to have a public session and this is going to be discussed for a long time to come, in the Cook memorandum he says, he has talked to progress engineers, and in discussion with progress engineers, shows it to be a potentially major problem affecting both flight safety and program cost. And last, he says it should be noted that Code M management, what is that?

MR. WEEKS: Code M-Jesse Moore is the head of Code M; the Associate Administrator for Space Flight is called Code M.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: He says it should be pointed out that Code M management is viewing the situation with the utmost seriousness. From a budgetary standpoint, I would think that any NASA budget submitted this year for FY 1987 and beyond should certainly be based on a reliable judgment as to the cause of the seal problem and a corresponding decision as to budgetary

action needed to provide for its solution.

Now, that memorandum either had not received much attention, on the one hand, which is understandable, assuming that there wasn't much confidence in Mr. Cook or based upon his experience, or it was followed up, and some decisions were made on it, and I guess that is what I think we have to keep in mind.

MR. MOORE: Mr. Chairman, let me just add one quick point to that, if I might. In the case of a situation that Mr. Cook describes, we have been following up, and we have been following up this O-ring concern for some time. In fact, you will see a program laid out that we have had under way leading up to some tests that are scheduled for the month of February.

So he is right in that particular aspect, and he is also right in the sense that it did represent in his common knowledge a budget threat, that we may come over and ask for a substantial amount of money in the budget request.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: I think that is the answer to my questions.

[260] MR. MOORE: You will see, Mr. Chairman, the program that we have laid out has been under way for some time in this whole question about O-rings.

MR. WEEKS: Now, I think that we could-

DR. WALKER: Excuse me. When you have a situation where a system doesn't perform as you predicted, do you have some mechanism where you look at that and decide what the implications might be for safety or schedule, or whether something can be slipped? Do you have some procedures that you go through?

MR. MOORE: Mr. Walker, we have two major paths that we undertake. One is we have got a program path which people in my office work with the corresponding center people, and the center people work with the corresponding contractor people to go and address that problem from a standpoint of how do we resolve it. And then independent of that, using some of the same people, however, we have a whole flight readiness review process to determine if this particular problem is enough of a concern that we should not fly. That is done in parallel, and actions come out both in our flight preparation process that we described the other day, as well as in our program process where we go through that analysis. And I hope as we go through this today you will see some of that come out.

But we have those two major paths that are followed up.

DR. WALKER: It might be useful to be sure that that documentation is available and in place in

case you might need it.

MR. MOORE: You will see, Mr. Walker, the program side of this whole question of concern about O-rings today. We have laid that out in very great technical detail today, and we will tell you the actions that the program has taken in terms of trying to get a handle on this problem and so forth. So you will see that as part of the data that is presented to you today.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Well, I have been urging members of the Commission not to interrupt, and I have been the worst offender.

So please go ahead.

MR. WEEKS: I rather think that Roman II, Mr. Irv Davids, will be in better context, because his memo was followed up by this August 19th which Mr. Mulloy is going to speak to in great detail. And I think that will be a better context to put that whole memo in.

And then the next one is this briefing number three, which is the budget briefing material on August 21st, which was, as Mr. Moore said, around the August time frame is when we are putting together the budget for the following February 3rd, 4th, whenever it is submitted to the Congress.

And so this was a budget recommendation briefing that was going to the budget administrator on the 21st. It was made up on the 16th, as you can see there on the front page, and as it actually happened, this particular briefing because of the press of time did not get to the administrator in that particular case. A number of other briefings on the orbiter did get to him.

And so this is just a budget threat item that we in general tell the administrator about so that he isn't blindsided that we haven't told him of some threat that he may have to help us get money moved around in the agency to hold a tough problem together. Usually Jess Moore can handle it within his own resources, but

quite often he cannot and the administrator has to jump into the situation.

Then on number four, which is September the 10th, which is Mr. Winterhalter's preparation for this monthly meeting I spoke to you about, this is just a checklist of the erosion of the particular case on 51-I; that he is telling Mr. Moore at our monthly meetings about what the problems may be.

And then December 10th is the monthly status report. You will see there that number two on that one, which is now-and now I'm on page 15, and there is the case to case, nozzle, O-ring charring or erosion. When you see "charring" you will see Mr. Mulloy's pitch. Erosion-if you will use those interchangeably. [Ref. 2/10-8]

We are a little sloppy. We all know charring and erosion are fundamentally different, but sometimes we get lax with the imprecise language.

DR. RIDE: Can I ask you a question? Back on number three-and I guess I am back on the budget threats. You've got this SRM O-ring charring listed as a potential budget threat. What sort of threat to the budget was it being considered as?

In other words, were people thinking of it as a threat because they needed lots more O-rings, or were they thinking of it as a threat because there was a

potential redesign of the solid rocket? In other words, how serious a safety consideration was this and what kind of budget implications did it have?

I mean, when people were briefing this were they saying we may have a solid rocket design or redesign, or were they saying we need more O-rings?

MR. WEEKS: We had seen some of the alternates of the type of design that it might require, and some of them were quite livable in Mr. Moore's budget and some would have been very difficult to handle.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: What about this one?

MR. WEEKS: Well, you see, as Mr. Moore stated we really haven't figured out what this failure is, at least not to my knowledge, and so haven't come down in any way on what - -

MR. MOORE: Excuse me.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: You're not answering the question.

MR. MOORE: Let me try and answer the question from a budget threat point of view. What we had under way, we did not have a safety of flight concern in our program area that said we should not fly the shuttle at this point in time.

We did look at this thing as being a long term, because we had a different design on the filament wound case, that because we were seeing some erosion, that we might have to change that design and it would be better off to change that design in the long term.

So a program was put in place to look at the results of the filament wound case activity and some other tests to decide if we wanted to continue to fly with the erosion concern we had or whether or not we wanted to go back and redesign.

And that was the context of the budget threat and there was a question of how much money was in that thing. We didn't have a feel for particular money in there. We just said, we may have to go back and get good tests out of this filament wound case, and we may have to go back and redesign.

[262] So these were some of the things that we were talking about in Irv David's memo and what they were going to put into the filament wound case program, that we wanted to see how that particular thing operated.

DR. RIDE: I guess what I'm concerned about is, you're saying you might want a potential redesign because you were concerned at some level about erosion of the seals, and if there's any concern if the O-rings go you've lost the solids, and if you've lost the solids you've lost the flight.

So that seems like a fairly serious consideration.

MR. MOORE: It was a serious consideration, and in the analysis that will be presented by Larry

Mulloy and the Marshall people here this afternoon it was given a very serious look and everybody in the program felt that we did not have a safety of flight concern and that we should stop flying the program.

We also changed out after each particular flight. The O-rings went back for complete refurbishment on the entire case. And we also knew that at the same time there were some questions about the O-ring erosion, and we were using some of the data that we were planning to get from the filament wound cases and some of the other lab tests at the Marshall Space Flight Center in order to decide what the size of that particular issue was.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Do you know whether there are any documents relating to the arguments pro and con on that subject or any reportings of what was being said about it?

MR. MOORE: There are certainly a lot of documents on that, Mr. Chairman. There are a lot of documents leading up to the flight and there were a lot of people involved in being sent telecoms certifying that they were ready to fly. We have all of the documents from everyone in the program certifying the shuttle.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: I'm really less interested

in that than whether there were two schools of thought, whether some people were saying we should stop and others thought it was such a serious safety consideration that we should stop and correct it, no matter what the budgetary considerations are, and other people say, no, it costs too much, or we're not worried about the safety aspect, or it has some safety features but were not very aware of them? Do we have that kind of a discussion? Because just these charts don't really help us too much.

MR. MOORE: To my knowledge-and anybody else in the room can address the question that you asked. To my knowledge, there was no concern on the part of anybody here who said we should stop flying because of the budget threat potential and so on.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Was there anybody who said we ought to stop for a little while and slow down and take the following corrective steps before we fly?

MR. MOORE: No, sir.

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: As I look down this list, it looks-and you can correct me, but at these seven bullets here, this is really the only one that is of a technical nature. Am I correct?

MR. MOORE: Which one?

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: Well, it has

"turn-around improvements" and "dual source" and "flight sets."

[263] MR. WEEKS: No. The top one, Mr. Chairman, is a technical question. And you understand the reason this is here is because it is in the New York Times article.

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I understand.

MR. WEEKS: And we underlined it because it is the germane point. But truly, the top one is a technical question in getting the filament wound case comments.

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: The filament wound case is a technical consideration, but it's not a safety of flight consideration in this context because it is a potential improvement.

MR. WEEKS: Well, but it has to meet the full strength requirements or it indeed is just as safety in flight as any other item.

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: But what I'm trying to understand here, this charring item on the chart is on there, and that says that there was a concern of some sort and Mr. Moore is telling us that it wasn't a safety of flight concern. And what I'm trying to understand is, what might have made it a safety in flight concern.

What is the difference? What is the dividing

line that put it on this, and what is the dividing line that would put it into a safety of flight consideration?

MR. MOORE: I will ask Dave Winterhalter here, who is head of that division, to tell you of his perceptions on this fine line of the safety of flight concern, and also the concern we had about the O-ring.

MR. WINTERHALTER: Firstly, if I thought at the time that that was a real safety of flight issue that it wouldn't have been a budget threat. It wouldn't have appeared on this list. It would have appeared as a mandatory change, a make-work change, that we would say we don't do any more flying, we don't do any more testing, until we make some changes.

What we were talking about in this instance was we had seen some erosion on the O-rings. We had taken some action to take a look at some changes in designs, et cetera. However, we hadn't completed that evaluation to the point where we had scoped it moneywise to say, okay, it's going to take maybe $5, $10 million worth of extra testing and improvement in order to bring that on later in the program.

But we listed it as a budget threat, something that maybe would use up some of our APA, whatever reserve we had in the program. Now, obviously if we had a

whole list of things there that would also have the same effect on the budget. If they were an overrun, they weren't determined to be a budget threat.

DR. RIDE: What amount of erosion would have given you a problem to call it a safety in flight issue?

MR. WINTERHALTER: Well, we had test results on this and, even with the erosion on the secondary ring, which was the only instance we saw, we had a safety factor sizewise of over two to one in our tests.

DR. RIDE: What does that mean in terms of the amount of time?

MR. MULLOY: That is probably best explained with some charts that I have in my briefing.

MR. WEEKS: Sally, I don't think that you should get the idea that we weren't deeply concerned about that first instance of the secondary O-ring having erosion.

VICE CHAIRMAN ARMSTRONG: I find myself not really understanding the feeling of the people that were involved in this.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: What is it that shows how you resolved your concerns?

[264] MR. WEEKS: Well, I think that if we could proceed and get past the New York Times thing and get into the genuine chronology, I think that would come

through a lot better.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Before you do, Mr. Chairman, I would like to call your attention to page 17. And when we look at the Cook memo you have a statement that the failure of the seal would certainly be catastrophic, and it was stated that that was overstated.

And if you look at page 17, here's another group saying the same thing. It says: "Failure mode and causes," and then about the fourth of fifth box down, "failure effects summary."

MR. WEEKS: Now, this is the document that is the December 1982, and that is when it was signed by myself, on the 28th of March in 1983. The critical items list were changed from a one redundant to a criticality one period, which means the redundance was to some degree compromised.

GENERAL KUTYNA: My problem is the New York Times kind of problem. Here it said that Cook says it's going to be catastrophic and here is another guy says loss of mission, vehicle, and crew. Somehow we've got to be able to explain in the open session tomorrow why this is different from what you said.

MR. WALKER: What action was taken as a result of this analysis?

MR. WEEKS: As you will see over the time

period, you will see in Mr. Mulloy's testing many, many things that were done as regards this O-ring seal deflection which he speaks to here as a problem.

MR. WALKER: Some changes were made?

MR. WEEKS: Changes were made and tests were done to identify how much erosion was liveable, how much deflection really occurs as a result of this CIL back three years ago.

Now, this critical items list, as you can see there at the bottom, here we were, after we had had eight static test firings, we had five flights. We had 180, 54 field and 126 factory joints that were tested with no evidence of leakage.

We also had the Titan III program, which is a single seal instead of a dual seal, and they had about a thousand joints that, to the best of our knowledge, had not had a problem.

MR. WALKER: It looks like the Titan seals have different characteristics.

MR. WEEKS: Well, in one of the critical things, it is not redundant. In one of the critical things, the dual is better.

DR. COVERT: Maybe it's a different pressure.

MR. WEEKS: I can't authoritatively speak to the comparative difference in the two joints. I haven't seen any

numbers on that. We know what our deflections were.

DR. LUCAS: I think you said we changed something there. Are you speaking of the filament would case? I don't believe a change was made on the steel case flight, was it?

MR. WEEKS: I stand corrected.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Could I make one comment? We're not talking about the New York Times article now. The New York Times article called the whole thing to the public's attention. Now we're talking about the documents that you produced, and let's forget the New York Times.

We're not analyzing the New York Times; we're analyzing your documents. As far as I'm concerned, that is what we're talking about, and that is what we will be talking about tomorrow.

[265] I mean, we're not here to decide whether the New York Times writes good stories or not. We're here because of the critical nature of the subject matter.

We're here to consider what NASA did in view of its own internal documents.

MR. WEEKS: If I could I think go to page 2, which is page 18 that shows the test program that was done, in which the O-ring withstood 1600 psi, which is the actual operating pressure. The test program

withstood-and this is back now three years ago-that the O-ring can withstand four pressurization cycles before any damage to the rings can occur or did occur.

We had over 540 joints exposed to the pressurization levels at the mean operating pressure, which is essentially 1,000 psi, with no leakage past the primary O-ring.

DR. COVERT: With the liner and the insulation in? What was the configuration in the tests?

MR. WEEKS: In the liquid pressurization system, I'm quite sure that that is oil out of the factory in Utah, and there is no insulation.

DR. COVERT: So there's no insulation at all?

MR. WEEKS: None. This was a liquid test.

DR. COVERT: So it is just the steel shell?

MR. WEEKS: And the O-rings, et cetera.

DR. COVERT: Essentially an isothermal test?

MR. WEEKS: Yes. I'm sure it's at room temperature.

And so this is a document that is our--

DR. COVERT: Is this thing lying on its side or vertical?

MR. WEEKS: I think they're tested vertically.

A critical items list is, if it is deemed to

be category one, and you will see that this was changing from category 1-R, which is redundant, to category 1, which meant the redundancy was not full. As you can see here, full redundancy exists-this is in the middle of the first paragraph: "Full redundancy exists at the moment of initial pressurization."

And that is of course a very critical time, because the pressure in the motor is coming up in about 600 milliseconds to the 900 psi. And this joint rotation-and the reason that this particular CIL was written was it was found that that joint does rotate, and in Mr. Mulloy's pitch you will see a detailed picture of the amount of rotation which lifts off the secondary seal to about 42 to 60 thousandths of an inch.

DR. COVERT: Is this natural frequency?

MR. WEEKS: I can't answer that. Can anybody answer that?

DR. COVERT: I would appreciate that information, because that's going to relate to the importance of the 600 milliseconds.

MR. WEEKS: We will get that for you.

DR. COVERT: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Could I suggest that you make the answers to the Commissioner who asked the

question.

MR. MOORE: Yes,

[266] MR. WEEKS: And so, a critical item one which has to be signed off at the associate administrator level is a safety of flight of the crew or the airplane or both, and therefore it is changing from 1-R to 1 or signing off a critical items list, Roman I.

DR. RIDE: So in late 1982 this was identified as a criticality one problem and signed off based upon tests and past performance and all that sort of thing. And then you had subsequent problems with the O-rings, or at least subsequent charring on the O-ring.

MR. WEEKS: Correct.

DR. RIDE: Did you go back and revisit the CIL?

MR. WEEKS: Well, I think that you will see each step that we went through as we found each of the flights, Sally, that got different amounts of erosion. We were in effect re-reviewing this document as to whether it was liveable or not.

MR. MOORE: Let me add, Larry Mulloy, you might comment on that, because each program element in the shuttle is required to go back after an anomaly and carry it out through the entire project.

MR. MULLOY: None of the data really changed.

It changed the basis for the acceptance of it as a criticality one item, but all of the data that we received in terms of the joint rotation and the reason we were getting the erosion-so yes, we did look at that, and we felt the margins we were seeing-and I will explain some of this- during the time that it takes to fill the gap between the primary and the O-ring, that it is an acceptable situation. And I have no data today to change that.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Not even today?

MR. MULLOY: No, sir.

(Viewgraph.) [Ref. 2/10-10]

MR. WEEKS: Now, if I could go on to the Titan experience. And here is the history as we best understand it on the Titan, that it is a design similar. But, whoever asked the question whether it was identical or not--

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Could I go back to your last answer? Are you suggesting that you have come to the conclusion that these things did not cause the accident?

MR. MULLOY: Sir, I'm not aware of anything that has caused the accident yet.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Well, I asked you if you would have a concern today, based upon what happened, and you said no.

MR. MULLOY: Sir, I said I have no data that changes the basis for that being a criticality one item. The thing that changed it from a criticality one redundant to a criticality one is still valid today.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: I don't think that anybody who would hear that could understand it. Could you explain it so that the public would understand it?

MR. MULLOY: Yes, sir. If I could get to my charts, I will explain what happens during this rotation and why we think that it is a criticality one but the design is safe, given the criticality one design, and redundant.

DR. COVERT: Mr. Chairman, might I suggest that some of these things might be resolved by data? And I would hope that sooner or later we're going to get some numbers on these things, so we can get a feel for what they are. And I would suggest that some of these judgments might be withheld until we have some numbers.

[267] CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Yes, I think what I was suggesting is we want to be careful that NASA doesn't suggest by his answer that nothing has changed. That would be a devastating comment. I think the answer to that is, we're not sure yet, that is what we're studying.

MR. MOORE: Yes, sir, I think that's exactly right.

MR. CULBERTSON: The thing that hasn't changed, Mr. Chairman, is that this is still a

criticality one item. It is not a redundant system. That is what that piece of paper says. It placed it in a non-redundant category, causing it to get a lot more attention than would have been the case if it is a redundant item, and it remains that way.

DR. FEYNMAN: If I understand what "criticality one" means, it means it is important for safety of the flight. Is there a higher category than that?

MR. WEEKS: No.

DR. FEYNMAN: So that a failure of criticality one doesn't mean it was safe.

MR. WEEKS: It means if there is a failure of a criticality one item you can live through it.

DR. FEYNMAN: It doesn't mean there can't be any failures, of course. I heard someone suggest that something was criticality one and you would fly with it. So we still have to discuss later, I presume, the evidence that this criticality one was sufficiently unlikely or something that we could fly with it.

MR. WEEKS: I'm going to suggest, Mr. Chairman, that I finish these two or three charts on Titan. And then what I think would be more meaningful is that the chronology is there in your documents, and I think that if we went to the technical briefing of Mr. Mulloy immediately after that, we will get to the

heart of this matter much quicker and most everybody in this room will be happy.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: I think that's a good idea. Proceed.

MR. WEEKS: Okay. So just to tidy up the Titan thing. Now, General Kutyna may stand me corrected. The 26 ground test, which is the only place you will see any of the charring-and there was very little. And think we looked up something, and the worst one that existed was 10 thousandths on the single O-ring on the Titan, and there are 20 of the five-segment. That was the earliest version.

There were four of the seven-segment, which never went into production, but was just a development in the laboratory, and then two five and a half segments, which was a way of getting a little additional performance. And I believe every one of them flying now is the five and a half segment device.

And there is not any leakage, but there was this 10 thousandths. And there have been 77 flight tests, in which we have used 154 motors, and over 800 joint experiences.

MR. WALKER: Are you arguing the Titan experience applies directly to the shuttle experience?

MR. WEEKS: I am inferring that in that CIL

that was signed three years ago, that was a germane thing that gave us some degree of confidence that we could proceed to sign up on it.

MR. ACHESON: Question: Would there be stresses set up by differences in design between the Titan and the shuttle flight assembly which would produce different types of rotation and different values for rotation?

[268] MR. WEEKS: It certainly would, I'm almost certain, even though I do not know of their rotation numbers.

MR. ACHESON: Could those be simulated on the ground in any effective way?

MR. WEEKS: They certainly on those 26 tests-and I don't know whether maybe General Kutyna can tell us, but I'm sure they instrumented these and you can measure it on the ground. That's your best thing to do.

MR. ACHESON: My question, though, is whether the differences in the stresses in rotation between the two systems could be measured on the ground?

MR. WEEKS: I believe they could.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Let me address this. In talking to the space division, if they were on the stand right now they might say that their joint was stiffer

than the NASA joint and therefore the rotation was not as great as the NASA joint, and so the joints should not be compared as essentially the same.

MR. WEEKS: I wouldn't quarrel with that. But when I signed that document, of course, I did not know the details of the Titan joint.

(Viewgraph.) [Ref. 2/10-11]

This is the detail of the single joint of the Titan, and it shows here, this is the inside. The centerline of the motor is here, and this shows the single one fitting down in, when 850 psi comes down and it pushes up against that O-ring.

But it is similar, of course. This detail is very similar to what you will see in Mr. Mulloy's pitch, similar, but I accept General Kutyna's point that the amount of rotation could be slightly different.

GENERAL KUTYNA: Mike, let me point out what the differences would be. They say it's a beefier joint, it's longer, it may be heavier, and actually there is a crosshatch section or actually a compression and they have to sit for a while before they can get the pins in, to the extent that almost all of the putty is squeezing out of it. So there is very little putty within those two surfaces.

So it is a compression joint, versus the kind of joint that you will see on the shuttle, which is an open one.

MR. WEEKS: Well, General Kutyna, I sure wouldn't expect the stiffness coefficients of this insulation to be the same overall.

GENERAL KUTYNA: No, not very much.

MR. WALKER: Is that insulation ceramic?

MR. WEEKS: I assume that insulation is rubber.

MR. McDONALD: I'm pretty sure it is NBRO. I don't know. I didn't put it in.

(Viewgraph.)

MR. WEEKS: Now, this chronology, which is in your second frame, let me tell you what it is. But I think that if we went to Mr. Mulloy, which has extensive detailed numbers of calculations and so forth, I think we will be better off in this chronology, and then let us decide to come back to that.

CHAIRMAN ROGERS: All right, let's go to Mr. Mulloy. And do you want to swear him in.

(Witness sworn.)

[270] [Ref. 2/10-1 2 of 3] ["The Shuttle Inquiry: Flight Safety 'Comprised'; NASA had warning of a disaster risk posed by booster". THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 9, 1984.- Continued.]

[271] [Ref. 2/10-1 3 of 3] ["The Shuttle Inquiry: Flight Safety 'Comprised'; NASA had warning of a disaster risk posed by booster". THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 9, 1984.- continued.] [Ref. 2/10-2] [NEW YORK TIMES REREFENCES.]

[272] [Ref. 2/10-1 1 of 2, 2 of 2] STS - SOLID ROCKET MOTOR O-RING CHRONOLOGY.

[273] [Ref. 2/10-4 1, 2, 3 of 4] MEMORANDUM: PROBLEM WITH SRB SEALS. [From: BRC/Richard Cook; To: BRC/Michael Mann Subject: Problem with SRB seals; Date: 7/23/85].

[274] [Ref. 2/10-4 4 of 4] [Marshall Space Flight Center; SRB- SRM FIELD CONNECTIONS. April 1978].

[275] [Ref. 2/10-5 1 + 2 of 2] NASA MEMO ON SEAL EROSION PROBLEMS [From: Irv Davids; To: Associate Administrator for Space Flight; Subject: Case to case and nozzle to case "O" ring seal erosion problems].

[276] [Ref. 2/10-6 1 + 2 of 2] SOLID ROCKET BOOSTER.

[277] [Ref. 2/10-7] PROPULSION DIVISION SOLID ROCKET BOOSTER.

[278] [Ref. 2/10-8 1 of 2] PROPULSION DIVISION MONTHLY STATUS REPORT, DECEMBER 10, 1985.

[279] [Ref. 2/10-8 2 of 2] SOLID ROCKET BOOSTER ISSUES.

[280] [Ref. 2/10-9 1 of 3] SRB CRITICAL ITEM LIST. [Date: December 17, 1982; Failure mode & cause: Leakage at case assembly joints due to redundant O-ring seal failures or primary seal and leak check port O-ring failure].

[281] [Ref. 2/10-9 2 of 3] SRB CRITICAL ITEM LIST. [Date: December 17, 1982; Failure mode & cause: Leakage at case assembly joints due to redundant O-ring seal failures or primary seal and leak check port O-ring failure] - continued.

[282] [Ref. 2/10-9 3 of 3] [SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM - LEVEL I - CHANGE REQUEST; Title: SRB Critical Items List (CIL) Requirements.]

[283] [Ref. 2/10-10] SRB MAJOR TITAN III EXPERIENCE.

[284] [Ref. 2/10-11] [Detail of the single joint of the Titan].

MR. MULLOY: Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission:

What I will give you today is an overview of the SRM case joints, some of the experience that we have had with those case joints, the erosion that has been experienced in the O-rings in those joints, and how we have addressed those as we have progressed through the program.

The CIL or critical items list document that has been under discussion as generated in December of 1982, we generated shortly after I took over the SRB program, where we had a recognition from the structural static testing that we had done at Marshall and some hydro-proof testing, where we actually measured the rotation of the joint, that we did determine that we did not have redundant seals, which was the initial design intent.

Now, Mr. Chairman, as you have asked if we can explain this in some terms that are understandable, I hope to be able to do that. The simple fact of the matter is that, due to this joint rotation, which I will explain, one of the seals is not effective, in that it is essentially lifted off its sealing surface.

And the rationale for the retention of that is the analysis and

the testing that I will go through, as being we would like for it not to be a criticality one, we would like for it to be a criticality three. What is done in the process is to look, is there any practical way to make something a criticality three that isn't, and can you make it a criticality two; and if you can't make it a criticality two, which is simply loss of mission and no loss of life, then you make it redundant. And if you can't make it redundant, is it a reasonable risk to continue with the single failure of the system leading to a catastrophic failure?

MR. WALKER: Can I ask a question?

MR. MULLOY: Yes, sir.

MR. WALKER. Does that mean it's a single point failure, category one?

MR. MULLOY: Loss of mission and life.

MR. WALKER: It doesn't necessarily mean it has been a negative connotation?

MR. MULLOY: That is correct. It simply means you have a single point failure with no backup and the failure of that single system is catastrophic.

(Viewgraph.) [Ref. 2/10-12]

To orient you as to all of the joints that we have in the motor, what I have here is a profile of the motor. The two joints that I will be concentrating on because they are primary areas of interest to NASA and to this Commission are the Nozzle-to-Case Joint, where at the aft end of the motor case the nozzle is assembled into the motor case. This is the aft dome of the motor, and then the nozzle noses in. That is, it is bolted in with

a bolt circle, and it goes around that aft segment.

The other joint-this is a factory-made joint. That joint is made at Thiokol.

The other segment joints that we show here are made at Kennedy Space Center, because we ship the motors as an aft segment with its fixed nozzle attached, we install the nozzle extension at KSC, and then have a center segment, a center forward segment, and then a forward segment.

Those joints are-these individual casting segments contain a joint also. That joint in between there is the same type of joint as the field joint. In fact, when we recycle the hardware what is a factory joint on one flight may become a field joint on another flight.

This joint we have never had any problem with, because we had the layer of insulation over that joint, because that joint is made prior to laying the rubber in the motor and casting the insulation.

The configuration of this nozzle to case joint is considerably different, as you can see by this diagram, than what we call the field joint, where we have this clevis. And we brought a section that is a little easier to see exactly what you're dealing with here. This is a section cut from a motor.

This portion here is called the clevis, and this is the direction that it is assembled. The clevis is pointed up and the assembly is made. The tang end of the motor segment is aft. It is lowered into the clevis for the assembly.

There are two O-rings and two O