Tania’s Reviews > Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space > Status Update

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, Feynman wrote, for nature cannot be fooled.

Tumbling gently in free fall, it took two minutes and forty-ve seconds for
the broken section of Challenger to hit the Atlantic, and it now seemed possible that the seven members of the crew might have been alive the whole way down.

The intensity of the fire had incinerated so much of the cabin of Spacecraft that it was impossible to prove ...how it had begun. But the evidence suggested that it started with a short circuit caused by worn insulation on a wire in the cable bundles tangled near Gus Grissom’s feet, close to a leak in the pipework carrying ethylene glycol around the troubled environmental control system.

From the inspections on Apollo 1 accident : "When engineers at the Cape
conducted an inspection of the latest Apollo capsule, recently delivered from the contractors, they uncovered more than 1,400 wiring faults. "