He raised his right hand and swore to tell the truth. The first witness to appear before the commission was Graham, the agency’s acting director. “We are not going to conduct this investigation in a manner which would be unfairly critical of NASA,” he announced at the commission’s first session, “because we think-I certainly think-NASA has done an excellent job, and I think the American people do.” “Whatever you do,” Reagan had told him, “don’t embarrass NASA.” “Whatever you do,” Reagan had told him, “don’t embarrass NASA.” Rogers also had a mandate from President Reagan. He had a high forehead and a level gaze that gave nothing away. Rogers, 72, was a patrician New Yorker in a charcoal suit and a red-white-and-blue-striped tie. “I knew that NASA was screwing up.” Feynman met their fellow commissioners: astronaut Sally Ride diplomat David Acheson, the son of former secretary of state Dean Acheson scientists Arthur Walker and Albert Wheelon air force officials Eugene Covert, Alton Keel, and Donald Kutyna Avia tion Week editor Robert Hotz and chairman William Rogers, who opened the hearings of what the media dubbed the Rogers Commission on February 6, 1986, nine days after the accident and more than a month before the crew cabin was found. “I had to think about whether or not to participate,” Yeager admitted later. There isn’t anyone who can do that like you can.”Īs Feynman recalled, “Being very immodest, I believed her.” He went to Washington, where Graham introduced him to Neil Armstrong-“the moon man,” Feynman called him-and “the big cheeses of NASA.” He met legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, who was as uneasy in the halls of government as he was. “If you don’t, there will be 12 people all going around from place to place.” If he joined, there would be 11 people following an itinerary like normal bureaucrats “while the 12th one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. His theoretical work suggested that time’s forward motion may be little more than an illusion, a shortcut humans use to negotiate one of the universe’s four dimensions, but in human affairs he never looked back.Īfter Graham’s call he asked his wife, Gweneth, “How am I gonna get out of this?”
Feynman never saw any point in wondering if his work on the A-bomb had caused his cancer. By the winter of 1985–86, Caltech’s longhaired graying eminence was happy and comfortable in Pasadena, though he was still fighting a rare cancer that had almost killed him eight years before, when surgeons removed a tumor larger than a grapefruit from his stomach.
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During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he helped crack the sub- atomic code of quantum electrodynamics, inventing “Feynman diagrams” to show how light and matter interact. During World War II, he had worked on the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb.
Feynman said, “You’re ruining my life!”Īt 67, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist was perhaps the most famous scientist in the world. Feynman didn’t remember Graham and didn’t like the sound of what he was calling to offer: a seat on the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. The caller was William Graham, a former student of his at Caltech, now acting director of NASA.
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