Will in “Unfinished Business”

Will

Your kitchen faucet has washers. They keep water from leaking through the joints in the fixtures. And that's what O-rings do. They're giant washers that keep pressurized hydrogen from leaking out of the SRB, the solid rocket booster, that shoots the space shuttle out of the Earth's atmosphere. These O-rings have been tested and tested under every possible circumstance but one-- cold. They didn't test to see if the O-rings worked when it was cold. Why would they even think to test for that? The thing's launching from south Florida. When's it gonna be cold? On January 28, 1986, a cold snap dragged the overnight temperature down to 18 degrees and it turns out the O-rings stopped working below 40. So 73 seconds after the Challenger lifts off, it converts itself into a bomb and detonates.