> I wanted to convey what the 'let it crash' stuff felt to me the first time I heard it, and Challenger's disaster felt both higher profile and more distant in our collective memory than any random disasters I could have used.
This was a good choice.
> ...I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it.
Given enough people, someone will inevitably take offense to anything you write. If someone is insufficiently capable of considering the context in which a reminder of a thirty-year-old high-profile disaster [0] is presented, they're gonna be unreasonably kerfluffled.
[0] A disaster that was caused by a serious failure to remember and stay within the safety margins of a very complex and hazardous system... which makes the choice of this particular disaster even more apt.
Looking at the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... I'm guessing Soyuz 33, STS-1 and a few others would have worked, but any of those would have brought back similar images, whether the space shuttle image was of a complete one or from the challenger explosion, a failure in rocket science reminds you of any of those you have seen; car crashes and airplane crashes are likely the same.
Then again, it's possible the whole slide is in bad taste. I wanted to convey what the 'let it crash' stuff felt to me the first time I heard it, and Challenger's disaster felt both higher profile and more distant in our collective memory than any random disasters I could have used.
I could probably have avoided discussing the topic entirely, but I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it. It possibly failed.