[JGailor]

I took a professional ethics class in college, and the professor was a personal friend of Roger. The whole class was about Challenger, and the incredible failure of judgement around it's demise. Roger came into one of our classes and spoke to us late in the semester.

After listening to tapes of the trials, interviews, reading transcripts, and reading articles it was very apparent to me that this was a failure of management. The lead engineer, during the discussions of whether to launch the night before, was arguing that the engineering evidence did not support a launch under the temperature conditions projected for the following morning. He was told by Morton-Thiokol business reps to "take off your engineer hat, and put on your manager hat".

Evidence points to this failure happening because NASA needed a PR boost for funding, and M.T. wanted to continue doing business with them delivering solid-state boosters.

Because Roger Boisjoly spoke to Congress during the hearings he was black-listed from his industry. At no point during the decisions leading up to that disaster did good engineering practices that could have prevented this destruction come into play.