Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challenger launch

Re:Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challen... by dennisgorelik on Wednesday February 08, 2012 @04:53PM (#3568692)

"Boisjoly could not watch the launch, so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up."

One thing is to believe that the chance of blowing up is ~1% (which is enough to prevent launch).

Another thing is to be certain, that it WILL blow up (I assume 90%+ probability here).

If he was so certain, why he could not convince his management?

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Re:Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challen... by coles on Thursday February 09, 2012 @09:13AM (#3571157)

It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the following report and Feynman's findings. Anonymous polling of engineers showed they estimated a general probability of catastrophic disaster in a shuttle launch between 1% and 2%.

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Re:Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challen... by dennisgorelik on Thursday February 09, 2012 @11:06AM (#3571609)

So latimes.com's article blew it out of proportions. 2% chance of disaster is not nearly the same as "so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up."

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Re:Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challen... by blasdel on Thursday February 09, 2012 @02:24PM (#3572605)

You're conflating two different estimates: Boisjoly was certain that the particular launch would fail, and a survey of engineers gave a 1-2% estimate for failure across all flights.

Both of those predictions turned out to be extraordinarily accurate.

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