We should not blame people for honest mistakes. Challenger was not an honest mistake, it was political pressure overriding engineering. The joints were not supposed to leak at all, yet they were leaking every time and it was being swept under the rug. When someone suddenly demands to get it in writing when it was normally a verbal procedure they *know* there's a problem. That's not a mistake.

Same as the insulation damage to the tiles kept being ignored until Columbia barely survived. And then they fixed the part they blamed for that incident, but the tiles kept coming back damaged.

And look at what else was going wrong that day--the boosters would most likely have been lost at sea if the launch had worked.