The Challenger disaster was a devastating blow and prompted President Ronald Reagan to convene fourteen extraordinary specialists to investigate the cause of the accident. The result was the Rogers Commission, named for its chairman William P. Rogers, and included Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, physics Nobel laurate Richard Feynman, and mechanical engineer, Roger M. Boisjoly of Moron Thiokol, who had warned NASA of the uncertainty of the O-ring and its possible failure, which unfortunately came to fruition.

I remember when Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched by NASA in separate months in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As originally designed, they were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn’s rings, and the larger moons of the two planets. To accomplish their two-planet mission, the spacecraft were built to last five years. But as we see, they achieved all their objectives and then some!