BEFORE...AND BEFORE TOO

Before all these things happened leading up to the Challenger's demise, NASA was well aware of the hydrogen leak problem and its 24 Karat remedy. The Director of NASA. was one of five young men hand picked in thier youth by a committee of leading American scientific minds and educators  formed in the 1880's purposed with the responsibility of bringing America into the 21st Century. Mind you, this was at the end of the 19th Century..100 years before the arrival of the 21st Century. I guess you could describe this as an American 100 Year Plan. Each young man so chosen were groomed to be the tops in their scientific fields, each of which were metalurgist physicists and each establishing national standards in formulations and the manufacture of metalurgic alloys long before. A.S.T.M., A.S.M.E., A.W.S. Standards were even thought of. These five young men each believed in each other and especially in each their own specialty. Welding. Brazing. Aeronautics. Electrics. Propulsions. All five were competitve and vied voraciously with each other to be the one best metalurgist physicist of them all. One, built U.S. naval vessels faster than the enemy could sink them in WWII. One went on to build and sail U.S. nuclear submarines and another hooked up with Werner Von Braun to build the U.S. Saturn Rocket Program and NASA. I don't where the other two ended up, but they were in the woodwork somewhere and they all knew each others' peculiarities and vices, each others' strengths and weaknesses. When they've been right and when they've been wrong and somewhat blinded by pride.

The ship builder's forte' in later years was one of a kind specialty welding procedures used by NASA and its subcontractors. To bid on a job potential subcontractors had to submit welding procedures and if their welding procedures didn't match NASA's welding procedures they didn't get the contract. Because of this only a select group of subcontractors ever got the contracts..until the ship builder retired and started consulting on the side, selling HIS welding procedures and expertise on the open market, which in turn got him black-balled, by his college buddy...the Administrator of NASA, from ever again stepping on the Cape Canaveral Space Port properties.

So, years later, he gets an invite (from the very same Administrator who black-balled him), to return to the Space Port to lend his expertise to the cause of the hairline cracks and fissures made evident by 3-D radiographic examinations.

NASA excepts his terms and he returns to scientifically examine the problem and determines, after thoroughly examining the design parameters and as-built specifications of the Space Shuttles, that there has been an undocumented change in the metalurgic alloy used in the hydrogen bearing rocket system.

After drilling random core samples to obtain metal filings he runs them through various lab tests to determine the metalurgy of the rocket motors, valves, piping and hydrogen chambers as built does not meet the stringent metalurgic criteria specified by NASA designers.

Now, up to this point in time NASA was aware of all these facts. You see, the chrome-molly alloy specified by NASA was too resilient, to hard to the point of being unmallable in lathes, so without authority NASA substituted Carbon-molly, an easily machined allow, for the unworkable Chrome-molly.

 Here comes the money question. The question NASA could not answer and the question my shipbuilder could answer.

Now, bear in mind, NASA purposefully used inferior metalurgy that caused Americans to die.

The question? What will it take to fix it? Now, if Admiral Rickover had been asked he would have told them, "brazing." My friend the shipbuilder answered, "Brazing."  NASA then asked, "with what?" and he answered "all the gold in Fort Knox!"

Of course my friend the ship builder submitted an invoice to NASA for his consultation services, but it was never paid. Had it been paid by NASA, there would have been a paper trail..i.o.w. proof that all described above had occurred. NASA didn't want a paper trail, so NASA didn't pay it.