The presidential commission that investigated the Challenger accident concluded that simply including the nonfailure flights would have revealed the correlation between O-ring damage and temperature. A University of Chicago professor of organizational psychology wrote that the missed data was such a rudimentary mistake that it came down to “a professional weakness shared by all participants” on the conference call. “Arguments against launching at cold temperatures could have been quantified, but were not quantified.” The engineers were poorly educated, he declared.
