50s: Starting with a storage ring

Chapter 730 America's Version of Bureaucracy
Sun Zhiwei came to Florida this time to obtain the investigation report on this accident.

Although the Kennedy Space Center is a classified facility, it allows visitors to tour the facility during each space launch.

In fact, the most core research and development and manufacturing bases are not located here, so security here is not usually very tight.

Moreover, during the investigation into the Challenger disaster, many people were forced to take leave and leave the Kennedy Space Center.

Therefore, Sun Zhiwei found the large hangar where the aerospace center's accident investigation team was located without much effort.

Although it's called a hangar, it's not just a warehouse. It also includes a maintenance center, office building, and logistics warehouses, among other supporting facilities.

The accident investigation team is stationed in the office building here, and the warehouse is used to store the accident debris that has been transported here.

Sun Zhiwei found a newly completed investigation report in the investigation team's office building.

It turns out that in the first week after the accident, America, representing NASA, assisted the Coast Guard in conducting the main surface search and rescue operations.

The search and rescue operation continued until February 7. After that, Reagan appointed renowned physicist R.P. Feynman to form an investigation team to investigate the cause of the accident.

Under Feynman's leadership, a team dedicated to searching for, repairing, and reconstructing the wreckage oversaw the salvage and restoration of the accident debris.

Sonar, divers, remotely operated submarines, and manned submarines are among the technologies used in the search efforts.

Over a period of more than two months, the search team searched an area of ​​400 kilometers in radius, reaching a depth of 370 meters on the seabed, and found tens of thousands of pieces of wreckage and debris.

Most of these debris and fragments belong to the Space Shuttle Challenger and its rocket.

Over the past few months, they have been gradually salvaged by salvage teams and transported to an aircraft hangar at Kennedy Space Center.

Feynman's investigation team and related experts have been in this warehouse for more than two months.

They accurately identified and categorized every piece of debris in the warehouse.

They then drew the outlines of the space shuttle and rocket on the warehouse floor, placing each piece of debris on the outlines drawn on the ground.

Just last week, they successfully reconstructed the tail section of the right solid rocket booster based on the wreckage.

Then, by examining the burn marks, they finally found the cause of the Challenger space shuttle accident.

The direct cause was that an O-ring rubber seal at the tail of the rocket booster failed due to low temperature, leading to fuel leakage, which caused a fire and ultimately resulted in this accident.

The root cause was a design flaw in the rocket's research and manufacturing department, as well as communication problems between NASA's management team and the research and development department.

This is the statement in the accident report, which Sun Zhiwei interprets as:
The lower-level staff had discovered the problem, but the higher-ups didn't care at all, and no one listened to the opinions and suggestions of the lower-level designers.

As a result, the space shuttle launched at the wrong time with a defective rocket.

"Isn't this America's version of bureaucracy?" Sun Zhiwei looked at the investigation report in his hand and clicked his tongue in amazement. He had truly seen something new today.

Although the investigation report is not yet finalized, the main members of the investigation team have already signed it.

That's fine, because this investigation report may be lost or altered during the submission process.

This report should actually be the most complete one, so there's no need for him to go to Washington and wait for a potentially revised version. Therefore, Sun Zhiwei found an empty office and photographed the entire hundreds-of-pages-long investigation report.

He then put the report back in its original place in the office and quietly left the space center.

If it were the manufacturer of the space shuttle, he could try to find the design blueprints for the space shuttle.

Unfortunately, this is just a launch site, and there's nothing to investigate.

That evening, Sun Zhiwei arrived in West Melbourne, south of the space center, and the next morning, he took a Gulfstream 3 flight back to LaGuardia Airport in New York.

Since the establishment of the Robert Group last year, considering that he would be spending more time in New York in the future, he discussed with Lao Han and decided to build another secret mailbox in New York specifically for transmitting intelligence and information to him in order to improve the efficiency of intelligence transmission.

The cost of the new mailbox is not a major issue; the key is to have a reliable person stationed here long-term.

The job of the 'postman' for this mailbox is important but also very boring. It is usually done by older people, as young people cannot stand this kind of life.

The new mailbox has now been built, and Sun Zhiwei used it for the first time since returning from Florida.

The mailbox was still located in a toilet tank, but not inside the mall; instead, it was in a public restroom in the Empire State Building at 350 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The Empire State Building is a New York City landmark. It has 102 floors and is 443.2 meters tall. It held the record for the world's tallest skyscraper for 41 years after it was completed in 1931.

The Empire State Building is said to have 102 floors, but only the 85th floor has rentable office space.

Further up, apart from the 86th and 102nd floors which are indoor and outdoor observation decks, the other 16 floors are decorative art towers used to increase the height, and the 62-meter spire at the top only has a broadcast antenna and a lightning rod.

The designers of the Empire State Building back then really went to great lengths to claim the title of "world's tallest building."

This skyscraper houses more than 2 employees year-round, has 73 elevators, and over 500 public restrooms.

Because of the different locations, different methods are naturally used to transmit messages here.

Because of limited mailbox space in Washington, he only needed to choose any mailbox, put the intelligence or items in it, and the postman would quickly find it and move the intelligence away.

However, at the Empire State Building, it was impossible to transmit intelligence in the same way as the Washington Post Office.

Because there are dozens of cleaners responsible for cleaning the restrooms in the Empire State Building.

Although the new 'postman' successfully landed a cleaning job at the Empire State Building, he couldn't guarantee which floor he would be working on each day.

Sun Zhiwei didn't care at all.

The Empire State Building is only a little bit big. As long as the 'mailman' is inside the building, is it really that difficult to find someone among the cleaning staff on dozens of floors?

He doesn't think so.

After getting off the plane today, he drove an old car alone to Midtown Manhattan.

This is New York's busiest central business district, and the streets are as congested as ever.

(End of this chapter)