> I wonder, if there were any awkward engineer who asked > stupid questions sorta My understanding (borne out in the official report) is that Morton Thiokol engineers made their feelings well known to management. Management eventually chose to side with NASA. One particulalry gob-smacking part of the doco went something like - Morton Thiokol engineers expressed concerns to management and management ignored them, even though the testing program the engineers wanted to get running was fairly routine. In a phone conference between MT and NASA, the MT engineers present repeated those concerns to NASA, but no one either believed them or had the guts to stand by them. After the conference, management had a "quiet word" with engineers and at the next meeting, Morton Thiokol management told NASA that the system was OK after all. NASA did not ask why the MT engineers had done a complete about face, but appeared complicit in the knowledge that a low temperature launch (it was below freezing that day - the previous days' good weather had been predicted as storms and so no launch had been planned) was a definite risk. AFAIR the tested limit for the O-rings was 40F, and no MT engineer would or could make any objective comment about sub-40F temperatures being safe. The engineers provided more than enough data and answered enough stupid questions for a "sensible" decision to be made. There seemed to be no room for any kind of misinterpretation as to what would be the consequences of such an out-of-spec launch -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads