I suspect a big part of the tragedy of the Challenger was a breaking of the "futuristic utopia" myth that many had in their minds at the time. A lot of it has d

I suspect a big part of the tragedy of the Challenger was a breaking of the "futuristic utopia" myth that many had in their minds at the time. A lot of it has disappeared in the last 20 years (or at least moved over to the singularity/AI myth), but back then things like the L5 Society [1] were popular, and you couldn't read Popular Mechanics without some sort of story about moon/mars bases. In short, people wanted to believe that we could just go into space and leave all the problems we had and mistakes we made on earth behind. It was a sort-of "salvation". The Challenger was a poignant reminder that this was not the case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Space_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Space_Society