[TChad]

Nope, it was the cold temperatures on the 0-rings. Hard as rock didn’t seal.

As Richard Feynman told the Rogers Commission, but they did not want to hear it. They wanted a whitewash that exonerated NASA. So Feynman bypassed the commission with his clever public demonstration using a section of O-ring material compressed by a C clamp and immersed in ice-water. The world saw that the material had little resilience when cold.

Feynman found the Thiokol engineers' personal estimates of catastrophic failure was 1%-2% (not 33%), while NASA's official estimate-fantasy was 1 in 100,000.

This is discussed in detail in Feynman's book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

[bvw]

The rate of actual catastrophic failure to date is 1.5% That's 133 flights, 2 catastrophic failures.

Let's take a comparison. At any given moment there are about 5000 flights in the air above the USA. A 1.5% catastrophic failure rate would mean that we have 10 or so fatal crashes an hour, hour after hour, day after day.

In other words 1.5% failure is a rate that no sane person should find close to tolerable. It's murder.