“With a young guy, you don’t realize sometimes you can’t do something, so you go ahead and do it,” said one Cape engineer. “As you get older, you get more cautious, and you have a fear of how you would look if you failed.” The night of the fire, the young men of the space program suddenly became much older. After that night, there would always be a heightened sense not just that things could go wrong (they had always known that), but that things might actually go wrong, something that had been hard for the young ones to recognize.
