Far from getting a string of faultless test flights, NASA was seeing signs of possible failure during tests. There were also some noncritical failures during actual launches, which did not cause any problems with the flight itself but showed that the chance of things going wrong was higher than NASA wanted to admit. They had calculated their probability based on what they wanted and not on what was actually happening. But the engineers had used the evidence from testing to try to calculate the actual risk, and they were about right. When humankind puts its mind to it and doesn’t let its
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