To focus on an issue that Tufte often addresses, pretend that you are Lawrence Mulloy and it is late on the evening of January 27, 1986. Several engineers from Morton Thiokol have called you and told you that if the Space Shuttle launches tomorrow morning, it will explode, and all of the astronauts will die. But it is expensive to call off a launch, so you ask them what data they have.

Would you say "launch" if you only saw the first 2 charts on this page:

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

Would you say "launch" if you saw the 3rd chart on that page?

The decision to launch tomorrow is yours. What do you decide?