The price for exploring the frontiers of science and exploration can be high. They can be higher when others decided to needlessly risk your lives.
Except that it had been predicted. Examination of the SRBs launched the years before in cold weather showed that the o rings had almost failed. Before the launch of Challenger the SRB engineers informed NASA that the Shuttle would explode if launched. NASA got really angry, told them that they weren't playing ball, that they needed to take off their engineering hats and put on their manager hats and call them back. The company was worried about losing their contract and so called back and said that they couldn't prove that the Shuttle would explode. NASA then failed to inform various teams throughout NASA responsible for the launch of the engineer's worry. NASA, you see, was worried about itself. There had already been delays. There were talks that NASA was failing to do what it promised. What a waste of money it was. The President had already written his speech, or had it written for him, for the State of the Union address that day where he would be bragging about the launch of Challenger. NASA decided to risk the lives of the 7 astronauts on the off chance that the engineers were wrong. The engineers were of course correct and the Challenger exploded. Today this is taught in engineering and management ethics classes.
I know all about it, and yes some engineers were concerned but it's not like they sent them up knowing they would certainly die... Do you really think NASA wanted to lose astronauts? do you have any idea how much time and money it takes to train these individuals? It's not like astronauts are a dime a dozen, they spend years training for a mission.... What happened was unfortunate and tragic but was hardly malicious..... Of course that mission had that teacher on it (I believe her name was Christa McAuliffe )....
NASA's own safety rules said that if the O-rings were predicted to possibly fail then the mission had to be scrubbed.
I believe I read somewhere that Lloyd's of London, which insured shuttle payloads, had estimated from the beginning of the program that a shuttle would be lost once every 55 missions. Challenger was 51 and Columbia was 107.
That would have been expensive since they originally planned on something like a 7 launches a month. Would have run out of Shuttles bloody fast.
Unless they were planning to build a Battlestar I couldn't imagine why they would have envisioned that many missions.
The goal of the Shuttle was to make space flight cheap and affordable. So cheap that everyone would want to use it. Turned out to be hideously expensive with a really slow turn around.
Would have been better to have improved the Saturn rockets. After all none of them failed at launch. Nor at reentry.
Even more so when the engineers who designed and built the thing tell you not to launch and you ignore them.
