On January 28th 1986, the Space Shuttle
Challenger broke up 73 seconds after the twenty-fifth Space Shuttle launch,
killing all seven of its crew members. The disaster was, at the time, the most
catastrophic loss in NASA history and is still remembered as one of the most
disastrous and heartbreaking days in human space exploration. Following the
tragedy a Commission was set up to get to the bottom of the disaster and
uncover the cause of shuttle failure. The Commission contained former and current
astronauts including the first American woman in space and the first man on the
moon. It also contained a former Secretary of State, Air Force generals and
physicists. One of these physicists was perhaps the most famous of the
twentieth century, Richard Feynman. Feynman was crucial to the Manhattan
Project which developed the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in
1965 on the back of numerous papers and discoveries.
The Challenger
(formerly titled Feynman and the
Challenger) is a made for TV movie which first aired on the BBC on March 18th
2013. The film focuses on the role Richard Feynman (William Hurt) played in the
Commission and the lengths that he went to; to prove what was really behind the
Shuttle’s failure that January morning. The film intersperses real footage,
including that of the actual event with dramatisations of Feynman’s quest for
answers which are taken from Feynman’s autobiographical book What Do You Care What Other People Think?
The movie is well researched and generally very well made and features a
terrific central performance and compelling story.
