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Richard Feynman was pulled in to investigate the space shuttle challenger disaster. He refused to sign the report unless his findings were included. They were eventually included as an appendix, which is well worth reading.

There is a section on the main engines (you can search down to the SSME section)

https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...

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> Thus, it is not unreasonable to guess there may be at least one surprise in the next 250,000 seconds, a probability of 1/500 per engine per mission.

It's interesting to read this in the context of the STS-93 incident [1] where a broken SSME injector came close to causing a mission abort. Was this Feynman's "one more surprise"? He was writing this report 70 missions before it happened in 1999.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93

Thanks for sharing, this is a great read.

The bit about top-down vs. bottom-up design (Liquid Fuel Engine (SSME) section) is surprising to me. It appears for the Shuttle program, all the years of knowledge on how to successfully complete engineering projects with large CAPEX + large risk was just ignored.

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