While the failure of the Challenger flight may have started with faulty O-rings in the space shuttle, its fate was sealed after NASA decided to ignore the issue. In the time of the Challenger’s launch, the popularity with space exploration had begun to dissipate. Due to this, NASA desperately wanted the Challenger mission to work, in order to excite the public and start making shuttle flights famous again.
Even though not all the people working on the Challenger mission were willing to do whatever it took to succeed, the ones who did had nobody to stop them. Despite the many warnings given to the higher-ups at NASA, the engineers who predicted the Challenger’s explosion were ignored every time. NASA knew that the future of space exploration was resting on the results of this flight. So, when engineers at Morton Thiokol showed NASA data of the shuttle’s predicted explosion, they simply ignored it.
Social facilitation played a major role in this as well. While the workers were overseen by the NASA officials, there was not one present to keep the officials in check. They made poor judgment after poor judgment without anyone being around to convince them otherwise. This imbalance of power made it to where the engineers could suggest something to the NASA officials, but they could not tell them what decisions to make. All they could do was sit back and hope that NASA was following their advice.