An organization that had, since its inception, boasted of its ability to manage extraordinary risk on the frontiers of technology and learn from its mistakes had instead overlooked a litany of clear warnings; the signals lost in the noise of a complacent can-do culture bred by repeatedly achieving the apparently impossible. Seduced by their own mythos, and blind to the subtleties of engineering complexity that none of them fully understood, the nation’s smartest minds had unwittingly sent seven men and women to their deaths.
