Bob Ebeling was anxious and angry as he drove to work on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. He kept thinking about the space shuttle Challenger, cradled on a Florida launchpad 2,000 miles away. Ebeling knew that ice had formed there overnight and that freezing temperatures that morning made it too risky for liftoff.
“He said we are going to have a catastrophic event today,” recalled his daughter Leslie Ebeling, who, like her father, worked at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol and who was in the car in 1986 on that 30-mile drive to the company’s booster rocket complex outside Brigham City, Utah.
“He said the Challenger’s going to blow up. Everyone’s going to die. And he was beating his hands on the dashboard. … He was frantic.”
I’ve read just about every book on the Challenger disaster, and the fact that management launched the shuttle over the concerns of engineers is still shocking.