2026-06-28
Channel: What Really Went Wrong (85 subscribers)
On the night of January 27, 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol begged NASA to delay the Challenger launch. Their concern was specific and technical: the rubber O-rings sealing the solid rocket booster joints lost resilience in cold weather, and the forecast called for temperatures near freezing — far below anything the seals had ever been tested at. They had data. They had a recommendation. And they were overruled.
This video walks through one of the most studied case studies in engineering ethics. It's not just a disaster recap — it's a story about how organizational pressure, schedule politics, and the reversal of a "prove it's safe" standard into "prove it's unsafe" led to seven deaths and the loss of an orbiter. Roger Boisjoly's warnings, the infamous late-night teleconference, and the management decision to "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" are all part of why this incident still appears in engineering curricula four decades later.
From a tiny 85-subscriber channel, but the topic is meaty enough that even a modest production can do it justice. Worth watching if you're interested in how good engineers fail to be heard inside bad decision-making structures.
