And yet: beneath these crisp certainties, obscured amid the blizzard of charts, data-filled binders, and Viewgraph slides, the rocket engineers failed to realize that they had reached a critical inflection point. Over the course of the years they had been developing and flying the solid rocket motors, the men at Thiokol and Marshall had slowly expanded the parameters of what they regarded as acceptable risk in the joints. Incrementally, they had begun to accept as normal problems that deviated dangerously from the original design standards set for the boosters—and the seals that constrained
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