They said it was an o ring failure, how did they figure it out when everything was blown to bits
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I wrote a paper about this! Part of how they knew was because the same components had been the subject of a massive cover up/safety concerns case leading up to launch. Basically the engineers in charge of making the o-rings knew that they wouldn’t work below a certain temperature, but weren’t allowed to spend more time and money developing them further, and everyone they brought their concerns to ignored it. There’s actually transcripts of the meetings where the top executives discussed the o-ring problem, realized it wasn’t entirely safe, and decided to launch anyway. There’s of course a lot more layers to this and figuring out who knew what and who passed along which information takes more time that you probably want to spend on this, but the bottom line is that the shuttle exploded because the people who decided stuff didn’t listen to the people who knew stuff. There’s been lawsuits upon lawsuits, and maybe some reparations attempted, but NASA’s not going to like admitting that they blew up a shuttle and five crew members because their executives either ignored important information or never received it because someone else deemed it unimportant. We know that the problem was the o-rings because the engineers made predictions as to exactly how they would fail given the weather they were forced to launch in, and those predictions lined up almost exactly with the actual event. It’s unlikely that anything else was the cause, since all other components were held to a much higher standard. The engineers just hadn’t had time to test and refine them fully before the launch, which had already been delayed once and which NASA wasn’t willing to delay again, even for a safety issue. Hope that helps explain it some.
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