[panick21]

Wrong. Both were lost because of a fundamentally BAD ARCHITECTURE. And that architecture was bad because the NASA engineers who designed it, had never designed anything like it before and were never able to test or evaluate any of their assumptions.

Columbia would not have been lost if the Shuttle was top stacked, instead of side stacked.

Challenger would not have been lost if not for the use of solid rockets to launch humans.

Both of these design decisions were done to reduce development effort.

[pdonis]

> Wrong.

No, I'm not wrong. We're both right. Yes, the original decisions on the Shuttle design were braindead. But even given that, the decisions to ignore clear red flags from Shuttle missions were also braindead.

[panick21]

Agree. But I think that Shuttle didn't do intermediate tests of these things is part of the reason it never lived up to its potential. During development they lost fact of what they tried to achieve in the first place.

They sacrificed what worked for potential, but tried to take far to big of a step.

I would argue, if you design something that has so many potential pitfalls and so many operational constraints, and so many drivers that make it incredibly expensive and slow, it is understandable why they started overlooking red flags. They would have barley ever lunched at all if they had not overlooked red flags.