This was a terrible thing. So many saw this coming and nobody listened to them.<p>In my mind, what made this tragedy even worse was the way the program itself was conducted. You learn new modes of transportation and hardware by using it, many times to the point of exhaustion. We should have built a dozen orbiters and flown the shit out of them through hell or high water, learning as we went along. Instead we built 5 and every time something happened we backed farther away from the entire manned space program.<p>A lot of time was wasted, and the lessons we didn&#x27;t learn? Somebody else is still going to have to learn them someday.