<i>&gt; My (extremely limited, to be sure) understanding is that there wasn&#x27;t anything else that severe.</i><p>That&#x27;s my understanding as well. Boisjoly wrote a detailed essay describing the thought process that they went through to arrive at their conclusion that the O-rings were a critical problem (the other three authors are a professor and two students at RIT):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.rit.edu&#x2F;wlrgsh&#x2F;FINRobison.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.rit.edu&#x2F;wlrgsh&#x2F;FINRobison.pdf</a><p>The essay is a response to a criticism by Edward Tufte that the engineers did not present the issue properly during the telcon the night before the launch, and that this was the reason that NASA did not agree to scrub the launch. It makes clear that, at least in the minds of the engineers, there was no other issue even close to being this critical. Granted, they were concerned with only one subsystem, the SRBs--but the fact that this issue also dominated the telcon the night before the launch indicates that there was no other issue even close to being that critical in any other subsystem either.<p>[Edit: It&#x27;s interesting, btw, that in the essay linked to above, Boisjoly accuses Tufte of precisely the thing Yudkowsky is talking about in his article: hindsight bias. He argues that Tufte did not recognize or allow for the fact that the engineers at the time had limited information, but talks as though they knew everything that was known in hindsight.]