Adam Higginbotham

steel casing of the rocket, destroying the rocket and then destroying the external fuel tank of the shuttle and then taking the shuttle with it.

Yes.

And as a result of that, they call a meeting of the engineers at Thiokol, and they unanimously agree that they have to go back to NASA and say, we cannot recommend the launch.

You need to postpone the launch until the weather warms up.

And if you don't do that, we fear there's going to be a catastrophe.

They present this argument.

And then the NASA engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and the NASA engineers overseeing the program, they don't actually say we're not going to take your recommendation.

In fact, what they do say is, you know, if you continue to recommend against launch, of course, we will not proceed.

But they make it very clear in the way they talk to them.

that they do not want to hear any recommendation against launching.

And they really put them under a huge amount of pressure to reverse that recommendation.

Well, the important thing is that Morton Thiokol, the contractor, you know, this for them is the one thing that keeps this arm of the company financially viable.

So they couldn't be more acutely aware of how they really don't want to be upsetting their most valuable customer at this point in time.

So what happens is that they ask for a five-minute recess to get off the call and discuss it amongst themselves.

And during the recess, which eventually stretches to 30 minutes or more, the executives in the room

say that they are going to change their minds against the recommendation of their own engineers who are sitting there in the room with them.

And they eventually vote to say, yeah, yeah, we'll just go back to them and say that we changed our minds and we're going to go from a no-go for launch to a go for launch.

The conclusions of the investigation were utterly damning.

You know, the report charts a path to the launch pad that day that was just...

you know, festooned with red flags going back years, that the organization as a whole had had plenty of information about problems with the solid rockets that went back before the first launch of the shuttle ever took place, that the designs of these joints had never worked as it was intended.