I'm fairly sure NASA did read it because he was on the commission (or board, or whatever) that investigated the Challenger disaster. I believe this particular quote comes from one of his books (What do you care what other people think) (at least I think it's What do you care what other people think). Oh my, I'm confusing myself.

At any rate, I think NASA suffers from the same problems all extremely large bureaucracy do: lack of communication, strident "chains of command" and managers who are more who don't know enough to understand what their subordinates are telling them.

Mike the Usurper wrote:

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"

Linked from Dagmar's 6 dumbest ideas in computer security.

[Richard Feynman was one of the smartest guys this country has ever seen, and in some ways one of the luckiest as well. If the guys at NASA didn't read this before he died, then they probably shouldn't be at NASA]

bunnygrrl wrote:
At any rate, I think NASA suffers from the same problems all extremely large bureaucracy do: lack of communication, strident "chains of command" and managers who are more who don't know enough to understand what their subordinates are telling them.

Let's not forget that NASA is a particular form of Govt. bureaucracy that takes its lead from directives from the Executive Branch but gets the actual means to do so from the Legislative. All snarkiness aside, Feynman was spot on during the 51-L investigation. He didn't "play nice" like some commissioners, and called it like he saw it.

I will always give the Shuttle program its due: it is/was a magnificent machine designed under the most schitzophrenic critera of any major engineering project ever. However, the levels of complacency that (IMO) will always exist among cloistered groups of engineers, managers and technicians when they work inside "the only game in town". It took someone like Feynman to call "Bullshit!" on the intellectual lethargy that grows around such stagnant systems.