It seems almost unbelievable how such a stern, concrete warning can be ignored. Of course, we look at this memo with perfect 20&#x2F;20 hindsight, knowing that the O-ring issue caused a disaster.<p>I am genuinely curious why the warning was ignored. I am hesistant to believe it was through malice or sheer incompetence. Does upper managment get two overblown warnings per week by engineering, so that this critical warning was &quot;drowned by the noise&quot;? Or were there good (at the time!) reasons to focus on other issues first?