Not sure if this was posted because of the book - but a book on Challenger was released a month or two ago (https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Story-Heroism-Disaster-Spa...).

I just finished reading and would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in Challenger or aerospace in general. One of my better reads in the last few years.

And also infuriating to read...my previous impression was that there was some concern about cold weather + the o-rings, and one guy thought they shouldn't launch.

But the management mistakes were far more grievous than I realized. There was a repeated pattern of near misses on the SRB's over the years before Challenger, and most engineers working on the SRB's felt very strongly that they should not launch. The previous coldest launch was 15+ degrees warmer than Challenger's, and came very very close to failure itself.

(And while it ended up not being what killed them, Rockwell, the folks who build the Shuttle itself, also did not want to launch, out of concerns about ice).

I hadn't heard of McDonald either, but there's a recent book (https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Story-Heroism-Disaster-Spa...) that covers his contribution well.

(TBH I'm reading this book right now - probably 2/3 the way through or so - and it's kind of weird to see something like this randomly pop up on HN today.)