re: The Challenger exploded on this day 38 years ago...January 28, 1986.

I did a pretty deep presentation on this. From a structural side, there were multiple erosion events and because none totally burned through they accepted the risk that was out of the design, this term became known as normalized deviation,,,from a political side there was pressure to stay on schedule,,,this caused NASA to push the engineers to concede on launching beyond temp limits,,,,combined with some erosion, there was wind sheer event that flexed the SRB and the O ring couldn’t compensate and it totally burned through, which set of a chain of events that caused to strut to fail and rotate into the main tank and this a rapid unscheduled disassembly occurred.