News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by jiggawatts on Friday June 21, 2024 @07:55PM (#40755047)
The "who" was William R. Lucas.

There was a recent Netflix documentary where they interviewed him. He was the NASA manager that made the final call.

On video, he flatly stated that he would make the same decision again and had no regrets: https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/netflix-challenger-final-flig...

I had never seen anyone who is more obviously a psychopath than this guy.

You know that theory that people like that gravitate towards management positions? Yeah... it's this guy. Literally him. Happy to send people into the meat grinder for "progress", even though no actually scientific progress of any import was planned for the Challenger mission. It was mostly a publicity stunt!

Re:The Engineer Who Refused to Approve the Challenger Launch by lupire on Friday June 21, 2024 @10:36PM (#40755750)
Maybe he did it because he knew the shuttle was garbage (the absurd design was Air Force political BS) and he wanted NASA to stop using it.