Back in Utah, these issues continued to worry the beleaguered and overworked Al McDonald. But he was reassured by the rigorous process, the tests, and the findings of his own heat-transfer experts and structures specialists. Above all, McDonald well understood that riding rockets was a dangerous business; and he believed that after each mission, the men and women flying aboard the shuttle reviewed exactly the same kind of postflight data that he and his engineers worked so hard to produce—and, as a result, astronauts like McNair, Scobee, and Resnik understood exactly where the relative risks
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