Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was sworn into the presidential commission investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster that had killed seven astronauts weeks earlier. Feynman's unconventional, hands-on investigative style, culminating in his famous televised demonstration dunking a rubber O-ring in ice water, would ultimately expose NASA's management failures far more effectively than the commission's formal proceedings.
Challenger had exploded 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, as millions watched live on television. President Reagan convened the Rogers Commission to investigate, and at the recommendation of a friend, tapped physicist Richard Feynman, then already fighting the cancer that would kill him three years later.
Feynman disdained the commission's stately, scheduled hearings and instead prowled Kennedy Space Center on his own, badgering engineers and technicians directly, often getting more honest answers over lunch than his colleagues got in formal testimony. He grew suspicious that the shuttle's rubber O-ring seals lost flexibility in cold temperatures, a theory reinforced by an off-hand comment from General Kutyna.
At a televised hearing, Feynman produced a small C-clamp, a glass of ice water, and a piece of O-ring material, squeezed it, dropped it in the ice water, then pulled it out and showed reporters it no longer sprang back to shape. The demonstration, simple enough for any viewer to grasp, cut through weeks of technical testimony and became the disaster's defining image. His appendix to the commission's report, which NASA administrators tried to suppress, bluntly criticized the agency's culture of downplaying engineers' safety warnings.
Key people: Richard Feynman, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald Reagan