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> "He said, 'The Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die,' " Serna recalls. "And he was beating his fist on the dashboard. He was frantic." That

• taneq 11y ago
  If there's critical a weak point in the design that they're well aware of, that's known to be triggered by certain conditions, and those conditions are in force, then I'd say quite a few. It takes a huge amount of guts, though, to try and pull the plug on something like a shuttle launch over something as innocuous-sounding as some gaskets. No matter how certain he was that it would cause a disaster, the non-technical brass must have just thought "eh it's a gasket, I had a leaky gasket in my car once, we can handle a few drops of oil."
• JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I'm not so sure it is over the top. We're looking back after the fact. Think about it before the fact. Ebeling knew that it was the coldest that a launch was being attempted, the o-rings didn't seal in that weather, and so he knows something is going to happen, so what's the worst thing that goes through his mind? Total catastrophic failure. I don't think it was a prediction so much as a combination of gut instinct and panic knowing the shuttle should not launch.