What was the fatal flaw that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster?
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An underappreciated contributing factor in the pressure NASA felt to launch despite the dangerously low temperature comes from the origins of the shuttle program itself.
The military didn’t want to be dependent on the shuttle program to launch satellite payloads, they wanted their own dedicated system. But one of the selling points NASA used to secure funding from Congress was that the shuttle could carry military satellites into orbit, thus saving money– no need for a second expensive military system. The military expressed doubts about the shuttle’s reliability to launch regularly, especially in adverse weather conditions. But NASA won, the shuttle was funded, and the military did not get a new satellite booster (although they had older existing systems available for fallback).
And so NASA didn’t like canceling or rescheduling missions partly out of concern it would spur criticism of the program’s capabilities and reason for existence.
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