On Monday, February 3, the President made the formal announcement that he was stripping NASA of the authority to continue investigating itself. Instead, he had appointed William Rogers—a Republican loyalist, Washington insider, and former Attorney General who had served as Secretary of State under Nixon—as the head of the independent Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. “It’s time now to assemble a group of distinguished Americans to take a hard look at the accident,” Reagan said, “to make a calm and deliberate assessment of the facts and ways to avoid repetition.”
