The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence
The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The Data Was in the Room. It Just Didn’t Speak. On the morning of January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with 7 crew members aboard. 73 seconds later, the vehicle disintegrated in the sky, killing everyone on board. The technical cause was well understood within minutes: an O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster had failed in the cold temperatures, allowing hot gases to escape and erode the external tank. ...