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Yet by then it was clear that Cook had described the problems accurately. Feynman’s demonstration dominated the television and newspaper reports that evening and the next morning. Mulloy, under further questioning, made the first clear acknowledgment that cold diminished the effectiveness of the seals and that the space agency had known it, although a straightforward test in the manner of Feynman’s had never been performed. When such tests were finally performed on behalf of the commission, in April, they showed that failure of the cold seals had been virtually inevitable—not a freakish event, but a consequence of the plain physics of materials, as straightforward as Feynman had made it seem with his demonstration. Freeman Dyson said later, “The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.”

One extraordinary week had passed since Feynman boarded the night flight to Washington. The commission had four months of work remaining, but it had arrived at the physical cause of the disaster.

As the seventies began and the last of the moon landings drew near, NASA had become an agency lacking a clear mission but maintaining a large established bureaucracy and a net of interconnections with the nation’s largest aerospace companies: Lockheed, Grumman, Rockwell International, Martin Marietta, Morton Thiokol, and hundreds of smaller companies. All became contractors for the space-shuttle program, formally known as the Space Transportation System, initially intended as a fleet of reusable and economical cargo carriers that would replace the individual one-use rockets of the past.

Within a decade, the shuttle had become a symbol of technology defeated by its own complexity, and the shuttle program had become a symbol of government mismanagement. Every major component had been repeatedly redesigned and rebuilt; every cost estimate offered to Congress had been exceeded many times over. Unpublicized audits had found deception and spending abuses costing many billions of dollars. The shuttle had achieved a kind of Pyrrhic reusability: the cost of refurbishing it after each flight far exceeded the cost of standard rockets. The shuttle could barely reach a low orbit; high orbits were out of the question. The missions flown were a small fraction of those planned, and—despite NASA’s public claims to the contrary—the scientific and technological products of the shuttle were negligible. The space agency systematically misled Congress and the public about the costs and benefits. As Feynman stated, the agency, as a matter of bureaucratic self-preservation, found it necessary “to exaggerate: to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it could fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered.” At the time of the Challenger disaster the program was breaking down internally: by the end of the year both a shortage of spare parts and an overloaded crew-training program would have brought the flight schedule to a halt.

Yet the report of the presidential commission, issued on June 6, began by declaring that the accident had interrupted “one of the most productive engineering, scientific, and exploratory programs in history.” It attributed to the public “a determination … to strengthen the Space Shuttle program.”

When Feynman talked about his role later, he fell back on his boy-from-the-country image of himself: “It was a great big world of mystery to me, with tremendous forces… . I hadda watch out.” He claimed no understanding of politics or bureaucracies. These were matters beyond the ken of a technical fellow. Alone among the commissioners, however, Feynman worked to expand the scope of the investigation to include precisely the areas about which he disavowed competence: issues of decision making, communication, and risk assessment within the space agency. Kutyna told him he was the only commissioner free