The Challenger Disaster

A couple of years ago, I grabbed an audio book of Dick Feynman's The Meaning of It All, looking forward to listening to a familiar voice from my college days.  Alas it was read by a classically-trained voice actor, rather than someone with Feynman's dulcet Far Rockaway delivery. Right words, wrong voice. I couldn't continue. Thus it almost was with William Hurt in the BBC movie The Challenger Disaster, where he delivers Feynman in a cross between Brooklyn and Boston. That said he gets the mannerisms completely correct, down to the flyaway hair and rhythm of his speech, even if not the accent. Annoyingly, in the interests of drama, they collapse a number of details, waiting until the last 15 minutes for Feynman to discover the critical bit of data about temperature and O-ring integrity. The real story of Feynman going to Washington against his better judgment, even while he was critically ill, is of him working with Gen Donald Kutyna and drilling down at Marshall Space Flight Center to understand, systemically, what was going on at NASA, and building a case for the O-ring damage and organizational rot bit by bit. Nice TV movie, but too bad we escape from the historical record to get there.