What was the fatal flaw that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster?
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I want to add that, despite the claim that it led to a culture change at NASA, 17 or so years later the Columbia disaster occurred for much the same reason. Engineers had warned for decades that there was a chance that a strike from the frozen insulating foam falling from the shuttle’s external propellant tank could damage the shuttle. But there had been over 100 missions where it didn’t happen, so administrators got overconfident that it wouldn’t, and stopped listening. But that is the thing about modest probability events – do the action long enough, and they will occur.
The real simple answer is, Dr. Feynman, a famous scientist, found pretty much immediately that hubris caused the explosion.
Sure the technical reason was that an O-ring leaked due to temperatures out of range. It was too cold to work.
But if it wasn’t that then something else would have caused a similar incident. Because there were cultural issues at NASA which hindered aggressive solution finding and vetting.
The real simple answer is, Dr. Feynman, a famous scientist, found pretty much immediately that hubris caused the explosion.
Sure the technical reason was that an O-ring leaked due to temperatures out of range. It was too cold to work.
But if it wasn’t that then something else would have caused a similar incident. Because there were cultural issues at NASA which hindered aggressive solution finding and vetting.
The real simple answer is, Dr. Feynman, a famous scientist, found pretty much immediately that hubris caused the explosion.
Sure the technical reason was that an O-ring leaked due to temperatures out of range. It was too cold to work.
But if it wasn’t that then something else would have caused a similar incident. Because there were cultural issues at NASA which hindered aggressive solution finding and vetting.
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