Rogers William Credit - NASA

Personal: Male. Born in USA.

William P. Rogers was chair of the presidentially-mandated blue ribbon commission investigating the Challenger accident in January 1986. It found that the failure had resulted from a poor engineering decision, an O-ring used to seal joints in the Solid Rocket Booster that was susceptible to failure at low temperatures, introduced innocently-enough years earlier. Rogers kept the commission's analysis on that technical level, and documented the problems in exceptional detail. The commission, after some prodding by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard P. Feynman, did a credible job of grappling with the technologically difficult issues associated with the accident.