On the morning of January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger caught fire and broke apart in the air just 73 seconds after its lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center. Unfortunately, all seven crew members perished in the disaster.
President Ronald Reagan appointed a commission to investigate the incident. The Rogers commission headed by William Rogers, after months of deliberation, published a report attributing the cause of the accident to a failure in the O-rings — a sealing joint on the right solid rocket booster.
From the post-mortem perspective, it was an adequate reason to conclude the investigation. Still, there was one person among them who disagreed with how the reporting was being done. The man was Richard Feynman — a Nobel Laureate and one of the most celebrated Physicists of the 20th century. Feynman, inspite of his battle with terminal cancer at that time, agreed to be part of the investigation.
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