O-rings and production pressure

Allan McDonald's Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (2009) has given me a somewhat different understanding of the Challenger launch disaster than I've gained from other sources, including Diane Vaughan's excellent book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. McDonald is a Morton Thiokol (MTI) insider who was present through virtually all aspects of the evolving solid rocket program at NASA in the two years leading up to the explosion in January 1986. He was director of ...