“He Was Thin, Tearful And Tense”

From an NPR report by Howard Berkes about the recently deceased aerospace engineer Roger Boisjoly, who fought like mad but futilely to stop the launch of the doomed 1986 Challenger space shuttle:

‘The explosion of Challenger and the deaths of its crew, including Teacher-in Space Christa McAuliffe, traumatized the nation and left Boisjoly disabled by severe headaches, steeped in depression and unable to sleep. When I visited him at his Utah home in April of 1987, he was thin, tearful and tense. He huddled in the corner of a couch, his arms tightly folded on his chest. But he was ready to speak publicly.

‘I’m very angry that nobody listened,’ Boisjoly told me. And he asked himself, he said, if he could have done anything different. But then a flash of certainty returned.

‘We were talking to the right people,’ he said. ‘We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch.'”

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“Obviously a major malfunction”:

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