I once went down this rabbit hole, and from memory there's a report somewhere that shows that Scobee actually made some setting changes etc on the way down. He actually tried to fly the damn thing. What a guy.

It's almost as if when the Engineers who designed the o-rings tell you not to fly in cold weather because the o-rings will fail and your Shuttle will blow up you should listen to them.

The line about launching in April was not the worst line in that call. It was "take off your engineer hat and put on your management hat"  as an engineer that makes my blood boil.

Don't forget Richard Feynman who demonstrated at a press conference on live tv that NASA knew the risk of the 'O' rings.
He was dying from cancer so it was not unreasonable when he asked for a glass of ice water.
He dropped something in it and a few minutes later he interrupted the speaker to show a section of a 'O' ring similar to the ones on Challenger, solid with no flexibility to expand at Zero degrees Celsius.
And he pointed out that Challenger was launched at Minus 5 degrees C.
Previous to this NASA wrung its hands saying they didn't know why the 'O' ring failed.
Only a dying Man could afford to challenge NASA.
After this we learned about the Engineers warnings and NASA management complacency.

RIP to the crew, and also to Roger Boisjoly and Allan McDonald, the whistleblowers who tried to warn NASA, and whose warnings went unheeded.

I was clearing out my grandmother’s house after she died, and found about 10 photos of that distinctive smoke cloud in the bright blue sky. I had forgotten that she was there watching it in person. I remembered how, before any investigation had begun, she matter-of-factly told anyone who’d listen that any good housewife knows not to take a glass casserole dish out of the freezer and put it right in a hot oven. It’s going to crack.

I watched this happen on live television in my desk at school. It was the first time the nuns ever let us watch something on television while in school. It was an attempt to begin using current events as part of our curriculum. We had a display wall with facts about every astronaut on that flight. Of course, Mc Auliffe was at the center. One of our teachers had actually met her at a conference a few years prior. We all sat there stunned for a few seconds. I will never forget the noise some of the girls and the nuns made when they realized what had happened. The televisions were removed from every classroom after that day. Core Gen X memory right there. 😢

My grandfather never recovered from the challenger. He was a engineer on the project and he said he saw the temp outside from the broadcast and knew they couldn't launch. When they said they were going to he thought about calling in but had faith that the new director would be smarter than to launch it. It exploded while he was working in my grandmother's flower garden.

I once heard Christa MacAuliffe's mom say after they boarded, her dad said something like "I wish I could go in there and take her out of that thing."  As a parent that gutted me.

My grandpa worked on the team that assembled those boosters and tested them out here in the Utah desert. My Mom remembers watching this with him on the TV in their living room. They knew about the o-ring temp situation from testing out here in Utah and warned them. They were told due to the climate difference it wouldn’t be an issue. When it blew up my Mom said the room went silent. He stood up, told his wife he had to go to work, packed a suit case and vanished for six weeks. Came back and told my Mom it was exactly what they tried to warn them about and NASA dismissed the warning.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Gerald F. Bieringer, the Range Safety Officer during the Challenger disaster, deserves acknowledgment for doing an extraordinarily difficult job. Just 37 seconds after Challenger broke apart, he had to issue the command to destroy the two uncontrolled solid rocket boosters before they could endanger people on the ground.

It must have felt something like an air traffic controller being given only seconds to order the destruction of an uncontrollable aircraft—except Bieringer had just watched a national tragedy unfold and still had to remain composed, follow procedure, and prevent it from becoming even worse. He did his duty under unimaginable pressure, and that deserves to be remembered.

I still remember watching this at age 5. My dad desperately wanted me to get into astronomy and space travel. He pointed out beforehand that the teacher looked very similar to my mother who was also a teacher. That explosion certainly left a deep impression. A couple of years ago, I got to send my late husband’s ashes into space. That too crashed into the ocean but at least that particular rocket was only carrying ashes and not live humans.

I never knew they were alive after the explosion. I am shattered. Everything they tell us is the tip of the iceberg, never stop asking questions.

My 4th grade teacher was a candidate for that flight. Any confusion us kids had was immediately dispelled by her reaction to the explosion.

And the engineer that warned this would happen was scarred for life because he was ignored.
NASA management at its finest.

I was a fifth grader at Lindley-Presho Elementary School in upstate New York watching the Challenger launch with my class.  We were all excitedly cheering for the first teacher in space and then the whole class went silent.   We didn't know what had happened but we had watched enough shuttle launches to know that it was not supposed to do THAT!  After a moment of stunned silence Mrs. Perry suddenly ran to the front of the room and shut off the tv and tried to casually redirect our attention to the next lesson of the afternoon.

"Into the Shadows" indeed... any dimmer with the atmosphere lighting and we wouldn't be able to see poor Simon at all.  Get that man a candle!

Back in the 80's we'd watch any shuttle launch on an old TV at an assembly.  After Challenger, we never did again.

My father is the one who engineered and built the seals for the challenger. He doesnt like to talk about it whatsoever and yeah ive told a few people and friends about it throughout the years. Whats really weird is i was in a bar discussing the challenger with a few people and i let them know about my dad, NEVER ONCE said his name and all of a sudden this older lady sitting with her husband at the end of the bar asked " How is jerry doing these days? " i looked at her gobsmacked and asked how in the world she knew him and her husband responded with "she built the part that was connected to one of his seals ,the part that caused the whole thing!  Blew my mind to thjnk that they both ended up moving and residing in the same random  small beach community.

I worked for a company that did a certain kind of maintenance at NASA during those times. The man at NASA that coordinated our operations retired early. His reason was this: The running of the shuttle had become cavalier, putting time schedules ahead of safety, and he didn't want to be there were something like this happened.