Thirty years after the 1986 Challenger disaster, an engineer at Morton Thiokol, the firm that had designed the shuttle’s infamous O-rings, called one of his former managers. Bob Ebeling was eighty-nine now, and in hospice. Before the infamous launch, both had tried to alert NASA to the risks the Challenger faced, to no avail. Nearing death, Ebeling told the former manager, Allan McDonald, that he’d never stopped replaying the events of the tragedy in his head. He wished he’d made his case better. He asked why God had chosen a loser like him for such an important job.
