Challenger was lost because NASA came to believe its own propaganda. The agency's deeply impacted cultural hubris had it that technology-engineering-would always triumph over random disaster if certain rules were followed. The engineers-turned-technocrats could not bring themselves to accept the psychology of machines with abandoning the core principle of their own faith: equations, geometry, and repetition-physical law, precision design, and testing-must defy chaos.
I'm a Southerner, born and bred, but that doesn't mean I approve of all that goes on here, and there are a lot of other white people who feel the same.