Hell bent on putting that teacher in space.
Nothing else mattered.
I always felt if she wasn’t on board it would have been canceled
I was in Orlando at the time. I could see the shuttle off in the distance, then the smoke from the explosion.
Physicist, Richard Feynmann, was on the commission that investigated the disaster. He wrote a book, ‘What do you care what other people think?’, where he described parts of the investigation. According to Feynmann, NASA administrators were more focused on pleasing politicians than on heeding the advice of their engineers.