inaros

Essentially you are mischaracterizing what Feynman did or say, although this is also Feynman fault :-), by doing the famous public demonstration, with the ice water in a glass [2], although even there he only said it has "significance to the problem...". In other words, we should not simplify, even for the general public, what are complex subtle engineering issues. This is also the reason why current AI, will fail spectacularly, but I digress...

Feynman documented the joint rotation problem in his written Appendix F, but his televised demonstration became the explanation...[3]

Camarda is correct here. There was a fundamentally flawed field joint design, meaning the tang-and-clevis joint opened under combustion pressure instead of closing. This meant the O-rings were being asked to chase a widening gap something the O-ring manufacturer explicitly told Thiokol O-rings were never designed to do. Joint rotation was known as early as 1977, a full nine years before the disaster.

The cold temperature made things worse by stiffening the rubber so it could not chase the gap as quickly, but O-ring erosion and blow-by were occurring on flights in warm weather too and nearly every flight in 1985 showed damage.

The proof is how they fixed. NASA redesigned the joint metal structure with a capture feature to prevent rotation, added a third O-ring for redundancy, and installed heaters but kept the exact same Viton rubber. If the O-rings were the real problem, you would change the O-rings. They did not need to.

The report [1] is public for everybody to read...but not from the NASA page... who funnily enough has a block on the link from their own page, so I had to find an alternative link...