Richard Feynman’s phone rang. The caller was William Graham, a former student of his at Caltech, now acting director of NASA. 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. Feynman said, “You’re ruining my life!”
At 67, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist was perhaps the most famous scientist in the world. During World War II, he had worked on the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb. 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. 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. Feynman never saw any point in wondering if his work on the A-bomb had caused his cancer. 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.
After Graham’s call he asked his wife, Gweneth, “How am I gonna get out of this?”
She urged him to join the commission. “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. There isn’t anyone who can do that like you can.”
As 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. “I had to think about whether or not to participate,” Yeager admitted later. “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; Aviation 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. Rogers, 72, was a patrician New Yorker in a charcoal suit and a red-white-and-blue-striped tie. He had a high forehead and a level gaze that gave nothing away. Rogers also had a mandate from President Reagan.
“Whatever you do,” Reagan had told him, “don’t embarrass NASA.”