" In retrospect we know that the O-ring issue that destroyed Challenger
was inevitable. It had almost happened in earlier flights and would
likely have happened on some winter day sooner or later.

Supposedly there were partial burn throughs on recovered boosters - but NASA
didn't wake up to the real potential until they actually lost a vehicle.
There was an interesting article on the mind set people get into - Hey
worked the last 24 times we did it - we're on a roll!

And on Colombia, some said let's get one of the Recon birds to look at the
tiles - and again it was dismissed.

Go back and look at how long some satellites sat at SLC-4 being proscessed -
this itself would have impacted the same satellites if they were launched at
SLC-6

Val Kraut