I could see managers at NASA seeing their role as a union or labor leader, trying to keep their budget and their people employed at least as much a priority as safety. So they're willing to take more risks because they're in a position of having to balance an equation.

And it may be that the flaw is this uni-dimensional hierarchy that we seem to like, that seem efficient most of the time, but in reality not only miss edge cases but can cause them. The managers simply did not always 100% trust the engineers. Ultimately, the people with the power over go/no-go were more managerial than engineers, were more concerned with the politics, cost, perception of delay than they were at risk assessment.

All spending of money in any company or government is basically the same: someone at the top delegates the vast majority to someone else. And they choose that someone else based on trust. And the longer than chain is, the greater the likelihood someone is put in position where the chain of trust is just flawed. And you hope it gets exposed where people don't die, obviously. But that didn't happen here.

And that's why a bunch of people got angry at Feynman as well as Boisjoly. They exposed that the wrong people were making key decisions. Had they been the right people, then loss of life wouldn't have happened. Anyone that wrong is going to be angry, it's a personality flip of the coin whether they get angry with themselves for their mistake or with others for exposing it.