What was the fatal flaw that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster?
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The ELI5 response you are looking for : Bullies were greedy and did thing that the nerds told them not to do in the cold. But if they did not do the thing they were scared they may not have gotten a new bag of money.
Eli20: Vendor for boosters was up for a contract renewal and their management went against engineer guidance to launch in those conditions which were off the scale low for their specs. They chose to say ‘yes’ to launch cause it was the 2nd or 3rd time they scrubbed for various reasons already and they did not want saying ‘no’ to negatively impact contract renew if their stuff was not so resilient. They put their own monetary interest in front of safety. NASA themselves not blameless as they should have challenged the vendor on their own specs. Cluster F*** all around.
Lot of responses here about bad hardware but yeah of course something in conditions it was not built to withstand will fail. The real fatal flaw was human hubris and poor decision making. Even still they may have made it but for some unlucky wind shear midflight that gonked what may have been the rings being just good enough getting dislodged. They all knew these were temperature sensitive components that was a failure point and they powered through for non-technical reasons.
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