They Warned Them the Night Before the Challenger Launch
On 28 January 1986, Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch. Seven people died.The technical cause was never a mystery. A rubber seal was too cold to do its job.What's less widely known is that the night before, a group of engineers spent about three hours trying to stop it. They had warned about that exact component in writing six months earlier. They presented data. They recommended against flying. And by the end of the evening, their own company had formally told NASA it was safe to proceed.So this file isn't about what went wrong with the rocket. It's about what went wrong in the…
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