the physicist richard feynman ( who brought nasa to its knees by dipping the rubber o-ring gasket material from the space shuttle into a glass of ice water in front of the us congress to demonstrate that it became brittle when cold -- and that was probably the reason that the space shuttle challenger tragically exploded ) made this observation at a university commencement address he gave a long , long time ago.1 feynman pointed out the obvious -- that it cost money to duplicate experiments .