[net.columbia] Engineers at fault

joels@tekred.UUCP (Joel Swank) (03/10/86)

> 
> The lack of that press conference cost the Challenger crew their lives.
> 				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
> 				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry


    This is very unlikely. The most a press conference could reasonably be
expected to accomplish is to delay the launch until warmer temperatures.
Under most of the current theorys of what went wrong, this would not have
prevented the accident, only delayed it. If the damage that caused the
accident was permanent, the only way to have prevented the accident would 
have been to move Challenger back to the hanger, tear down the launch 
assembly, and find and replace the defective parts.  I think there was almost 
no chance of ANYTHING causing NASA do that.

Joel Swank
Tektronix, Redmond, Oregon