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By Root 2349 0

team made sure it had time to melt. Seven seconds after liftoff the shuttle rolled over in its characteristic fashion, so that it appeared to be hanging from the back of its giant disposable fuel tank, and headed east over the Atlantic, its percussive roar audible over hundreds of square miles. The breeze barely bent its column of smoke. At the one-minute mark—halfway through the brief expected lifetime of the solid-fuel rockets—a flickering light appeared where it did not belong, at a joint in the shell of the right-side rocket. The main engines reached full power, and Scobee radioed, “Roger. Go at throttle up.” At seventy-two seconds the two rockets began to pull in different directions. At seventy-three seconds the fuel tank burst open and released liquid hydrogen into the air, where it exploded. The shuttle felt an enormous sudden thrust. A cloud of flame and smoke enveloped it. Fragments emerged seconds later: the left wing, like a triangular sail against the sky; the engines, still firing; and somewhere, intact, a plummeting coffin for six men and a woman. The technologies of television, aided by satellites lofted in earlier shuttle missions, let more people witness the event, again and again, than any other disaster in history.

Machinery out of control. The American space agency had made itself seem a symbol of technical prowess, placing teams of men on the moon and then fostering the illusion that space travel was routine—an illusion built into the very name shuttle. After the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and the chemical disaster at Bhopal, India, the space-shuttle explosion seemed a final confirmation that technology had broken free of human reins. Did nothing work any more? The dream of technology that held sway over the America of Feynman’s childhood had given way to a sense of technology as not just a villain but an inept villain. Nuclear power plants, once offering the innocent promise of inexhaustible power, had become menacing symbols on the landscape. Automobiles, computers, simple household appliances, or giant industrial machines—all seemed unpredictable, dangerous, untrustworthy. The society of engineers, so hopeful in the America of Feynman’s childhood, had given way to a technocracy, bloated and overconfident, collapsing under the weight of its own byzantine devices. That was one message read in the image replayed hundreds of times that day on millions of television screens—the fragmenting smoke cloud, the twin rockets veering apart like Roman candles.

President Ronald Reagan immediately announced his determination to continue the shuttle program and expressed his support for the space agency. Following government custom, he appointed an investigatory commission that would repeatedly be described as independent—the White House officially declared it “an outside group of experts, distinguished Americans who have no ax to grind”—although in actuality it was composed mostly of insiders and figures chosen for their symbolic value: its chairman, William P. Rogers, who had served as attorney general and secretary of state in Republican, administrations; Major General Donald J. Kutyna, who had headed shuttle operations for the Department of Defense; several NASA consultants and executives of aerospace contractors; Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon; Chuck Yeager, a famous former test pilot; and, a last-minute choice, Richard Feynman, a professor who brought to the next day’s newspaper accounts the tag “Nobel Prize winner.” Armstrong said on the day of his appointment that he did not understand why an independent commission was necessary. Rogers said even more baldly, “We are not going to conduct this investigation in a manner which would be unfairly critical of NASA, because we think—I certainly think—NASA has done an excellent job, and I think the American people do.”

The White House named Rogers and selected the rest of the commission from a list provided by the space agency’s acting administrator, William R. Graham. As it happened,