Creative Speculation
In reply to the discussion: The Great Thermite Debate... [View all]eomer
(3,845 posts)I think the managers involved in the o-ring decisions were all engineers. I also read that the Thiokol engineers said the o-rings were safe, and that they based that on extensive testing and analysis of the tests. That's from a quick reading of this:
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/book/chptnine.pdf
But maybe there are other sources that would dispute that account.
The decisions on the NIST modeling were also likely made by an engineer who was essentially in a manager role, weren't they?
Anyway, the point I wanted to make about circular logic is that the NIST modeling involved more than just simplifying assumptions. It's not like they modeled the input of physical objects and merely applied simplifications while remaining blind to the results that the model would produce. If they had done that and gotten close matching to observations then the match might lend some confidence to the model.
But what they did, as I recall, was to customize (not just simplify) some assumptions to be what they needed them to be to get the model to match the observations. And this wasn't just assumptions about representing the initial physical objects in the model; they actually intervened in the middle of the model to set certain intermediate results just the way they needed to be to get the results they wanted. So, for example, they set the temperatures of specific steel structures to what they needed to be to force the model to behave the same as the observations. This is why using the match of model results with observations and claiming validation from it is circular logic. The modeling is rigged up in the first place to produce such a match so the match doesn't validate anything.