Fiona Pepper

That's what those engineers discovered.

And there were a specific group of five engineers that were very, very concerned about this thing called blow-by.

On January 27th, 1986, when they saw the forecast temperature for the following day, they freaked out.

They freaked out that this launch was scheduled to happen.

And basically they had had concerns for the last five years and their specific job was working on these O-rings and on these joints on the solid rocket boosters.

Like this is what they did all day, every day.

This was their job.

They were seeing corrosion and erosion in the O-rings when they pulled these solid rocket boosters out of the sea.

And these space shuttles are continuing to launch.

And so they were losing sleep over this problem.

They go directly to their management at Morton Thiokol.

Morton Thiokol management goes to NASA, to management in Florida, and they call this three-way teleconference, which is a big deal in the 1980s with, you know, the technology that we had access to then.

It was also the first time in the history of spaceflight at NASA that a contractor had called a meeting to try and stop a launch.

And basically there were five men who were at that teleconference trying to convince NASA management that it was not safe to launch.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, they saw it coming.

you know the discovery in the sink in the 1920s where they just couldn't wash this globular black stinky mess down the sink it's it's significant and that fast forward to the late 1970s that is contributing to fleeing these massive space shuttles into the sky

You know, it's not an unblemished legacy by any means because, yeah, it was this time of experiment and invention and that is essentially spaceflight.

They talk about every space shuttle launch was a test flight.

Something could have gone wrong.