Grun
You don't want to know. I've read enough of the mishap report to not want to know more. Nothing damning in there that didn't make it to the public, but some of the other details are pretty sad and upsetting.
The root cause of course was the lack of a safety oriented mindset within the culture at NASA that led them to ignore multiple safety red flags. The launch should have never have happened. Those who could halt the launch were under pressure from above, those who knew there could be a problem weren't given a say, and those in between were caught between pressures and wondering how much of a safety margin was really built into the system. In the end, the O-Ring was the part that failed, and it was determined that the conditions at launch were way out of design specs but the people who warned about it were not listened to.
It's fairly close to what happened with the next disaster, except there it was misplaced engineering complacency and a simple lack of time to think the problem through. Like the older mission... Mercury? where they didn't know if they should tell the astronaut that they thought his heatshield might be loose... These sorts of decisions get made all the time in the real world and sometimes a corner is cut that causes a fatal system failure. Unfortunately shxt happens and people who think they're doing the right thing may be overlooking something important. I guarantee you that on both shuttle disaster flights, there was a guy wearing a robe outside the gate saying that the flights were doomed because they went against god's will. Should we have listened to him simply because he was right about the flights being doomed? Should we listen to every junior engineer who thinks he knows more than everyone else?
The line was drawn somewhere, the astronauts knew the risks including the very real risk of human error on the part of the supporting agencies, and THEY STILL WENT. That's the important thing, and it's why they're going to launch a shuttle this year if at all possible. Losers quit, winners press on.
