Challenger and Fukushima tragedies undid ‘myths of safety’

Asahi
January 28, 2026

The space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 28, 1986. (AP Photo

I still vividly remember the stunning news footage that I saw 40 years ago. The space shuttle Challenger lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and climbs into the clear blue Florida sky.

Moments later, it abruptly breaks apart after an explosion. The vehicle begins to fall toward the Atlantic, leaving multiple white trails that hang in the air like scars.

Challenger, one of NASA’s early workhorse reusable orbiters, broke apart in flight just 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. All seven crew members onboard were killed.

It was the 25th mission of the space shuttle program. I remember, too, the sudden evaporation of public confidence in crewed spaceflight—something that, until then, many had come to treat as almost routine.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan responded by establishing a special presidential commission to investigate what had gone wrong.

Among its members was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. Reading how the investigation was carried out through Feynman’s own detailed writings, one cannot avoid a larger reckoning with organizational culture and accountability.

Feynman pursued the cause with tenacity, even as he clashed with colleagues. He identified a critical failure in the O-ring seals of the right solid rocket booster—the performance degraded by unusually cold weather—and he found that management had brushed aside engineers’ urgent warnings.

For Feynman, the deeper malfunction was cultural: a collective mindset inside NASA that failed to recognize that dissent was part of a vital safety mechanism.

Yet, his most pointed conclusions met resistance. They did not appear in the report’s central narrative and were instead relegated to an attachment: “Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle.”

The way this “myth of safety” unraveled inevitably recalls the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant disaster of 15 years ago. It raises the same hard question: how society should approach science and technology—how we live with it, govern it and assume responsibility for it.

When a tragedy occurs that might have been prevented, how do we face inconvenient truths and preserve them as lessons?

Feynman detested organizational ossification and bureaucratic rigidity. In a lecture titled “The Value of Science,” he put it plainly: “Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science.”