The 1986 Challenger disaster was a shock felt throughout the country. During takeoff, the shuttle exploded, creating a fireball in the sky. The seven astronauts on board were killed and the shuttle was destroyed. Immediately after the catastrophe, the blame was attributed to several people responsible for building the shuttle and the parts of the shuttle itself. The Presidential Commission was decisive in attributing the disaster to a faulty O-ring used to connect the pieces of the vessel. On the other hand, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, in The Golem at Large, believe that blame cannot be isolated to any one person or reason for the failure. The authors demonstrate that there are too many factors to concretely decide why the Challenger exploded. Collins and Pinch believe that it was the organizational culture of NASA and Morton Thiokol that enabled the disaster. While NASA and Thiokol were deciding whether or not to launch, there was no concrete reason to postpone the mission. Collins and Pinch draw a distinctive line between what actually happened and the public's perspective on what happened. The audience had a compulsive desire to create a moral lesson and provide heroes and villains. Many people have misinterpreted this as a conflict between experienced engineers and greedy management. The public believed that the executives at NASA and Thiokol were ignorant of engineering, but this is not true, as they were all engineers before their promotion to executives. The authors emphasize the phrase "after the event" to demonstrate that hindsight contributes to the public's view of what really happened. Physicist Richard Feynman stunned audiences with a demonstration of placing rubber, the material of the O-ring, in ice-cold water. The... middle of paper... companies. The structural test article simulated pressure on vertical components during launch. After testing, Marshall concluded that the size of the gap was sufficient for both O-rings to be out of position. Once again Thiokol refuted Marshall's claim by challenging the validity of the electrical components used to measure joint rotation. Thiokol believed that their test was superior to Marshall's, because it validated their conclusion. This is a fundamental problem known as experimenter regress. Since the true solution is unknown, the best test is one that supports the experimenter's point of view. Since this disagreement could not be resolved between the two, the manufacturer of the O-ring was consulted. The manufacturer told the two that the O-ring was not designed to the high design specifications needed for the aircraft, but NASA decided to work with what they had.