What was the fatal flaw that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster?
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Most will mention the o-rings, and it being too cold that day for them to seal effectively. Some will even abck up further and mention the poor risk-management and decision making as the root cause, but that really misses the point too. The actual design flaw, the root cause of the accident, was that the o-rings even existed in the first place.
The only reason the SRBs had these o-rings is because they were built in sections small enough to be shipped by rail. This was a design compromise (it would have been cheaper and stronger and lighter and more reliable to build as a single piece). If they’d built it as a single piece, the o-rings that failed would not even be part of the design in the first place. However, the only way NASA could get the funding for the shuttle program approved was to guarantee that Thikol would be given the contracts for the SRBs. If they hadn’t, senators from Utah (where the Thikol plant was located) would not have signed off on the budget. They wanted those jobs and millions of dollars in revenue to go to THEIR state. So instead of building the SRBs somewhere near a port that would have allowed for barge shipment of the complete boosters, they compromised their design by breaking it into sections that would be small enough to ship by rail, and used o-rings to seal those sections together. If NASA hadn’t had to compromise their design in the name of political expediency, the o-rings would never have existed in the first place, and they would never have been put in the difficult position of having to make that go/no-go call.
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