you would be incorrect. do you remember the infamous o-ring?
No...you would be.
'"An accident rooted in history"[edit]
More broadly, the report also determined the contributing causes of the accident. Most salient was the failure of both NASA and its contractor, Morton Thiokol, to respond adequately to the design flaw.
The Commission found that as early as 1977, NASA managers had not only known about the flawed O-ring, but that it had the potential for catastrophe. This led the Rogers Commission to conclude that the Challenger disaster was "an accident rooted in history."[2]
Flawed launch decision[edit]
The report also strongly criticized the decision making process that led to the launch of Challenger, saying that it was seriously flawed. There was a meeting the night before the launch to discuss any major pressing issues that might delay the launch further. Several of the Morton Thiokol engineers stated their concerns about the O-rings and urged the council to delay the launch. However, because there were no members of the safety council, the council decided to go ahead with the ill-fated launch. It is certain that even though higher-ranking members of the council did know about the issues, there were plenty of members that could have stopped the launch but decided not to.
This was done in large part because of the management structure at NASA and the lack of major checks and balances which proved to be so fatal in this scenario.[3] The report concluded that:
…failures in communication… resulted in a decision to launch 51-L based on incomplete and sometimes misleading information, a conflict between engineering data and management judgments, and a NASA management structure that permitted internal flight safety problems to bypass key Shuttle managers'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report
Sure, Morton Thiokol screwed up. But the major reason wsas because of NASA's 'Go Fever'.
NASA knew there was a major flaw that could be catastrophic, but ignored it anyway.
NASA was responsible for the launch...the buck stopped with them. And instead of being cautious, they rolled the dice - knowing there was a major safety fault - and the astronauts came up snake eyes.
And during the Columbia disaster, again NASA had a good idea what was going to happen, but ignored it and just wrote it off to a dangerous job.
Once again their Go Fever killed 7 brave people.
'The original shuttle operational specification said the orbiter thermal protection tiles were not designed to withstand any debris hits at all. Over time NASA managers gradually accepted more tile damage, similar to how O-ring damage was accepted. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board called this tendency the "normalization of deviance" — a gradual acceptance of events outside the design tolerances of the craft simply because they had not been catastrophic to date'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_program#Accidents
'It was in the context of these organizational factors that the CAIB discussed the role of decisions made by Linda Ham, as well as by other NASA managers, in contributing to the disaster.
According to the book "Comm Check..." by William Harwood and Michael Cabbage, Linda Ham squelched requests for external photos to be taken after the requests had been sent by two individual departments at NASA. Engineers in these departments were concerned that the foam strike on the left wing, clearly captured by launch-day video recorded for every launch, had caused more damage than initially thought. Based on computer modeling later proven inadequate, Ham's mistaken belief was that the damage was not serious, and that at most it would merely lengthen the time necessary to refurbish Columbia between missions. Referring to the supposed minor damage in a review meeting, she was quoted as saying that "...there's nothing we can do about it anyway".[15] Ham decided to quash the request for high-resolution imaging of the shuttle, based on her belief that the damage was too minor to be of consequence.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Ham#Columbia_disaster_and_investigation_report
Again...this Go Fever bull****.
And that is largely because they are bureaucrats...they answer to no one.
The private sector cannot afford to make such public relations disasters for fear of losing their jobs. They take less chances not because they care more...but becasue they cannot afford NOT to care more.