Roger Boisjoly recently passed away. He was one of the engineers who tried to stop the ill fated launch of Challenger on an abnormally cold morning in Florida. He knew there was a high risk of the O rings leaking if they were cold, NASA management refused to listen to him, an O ring did failt, it ended in catastrophe. The Shuttle program was crippled from that day on.
From the article:
"It was the end of the dream," said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aerospace. "Before the Challenger, you could think about the idea of going boldly where no one had gone before. The accident ended it."
Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.
The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.
When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger. By that time, Boisjoly believed that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished.
NASA's mismanagement "is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel," Boisjoly said. "I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense."