The Challenger disaster occurred on the 28th January of 1986, when the NASA Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger broke apart and disintegrated at 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. The accident had serious consequences for the NASA credibility and resulted in an interruption of 32 months in the shuttle program. The Presidential Rogers Commission (formed by astronaut Neil A. Armstrong and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman141, among others) was created in order to investigate the causes of the disaster.

The Rogers Commission elaborated a report (Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident 1986) with all the findings. The commission determined that the disintegration began with the failure of an O-ring seal in the solid rocket booster due to the unusually cold temperature (?0.6 Celsius degrees; 30.92 Fahrenheit degrees) during the launch. This failure produced a breach of burning gas through the solid rocket booster that compromised the whole shuttle structure, resulting in its disintegration due to the extreme aerodynamic forces.

The problem with O-rings was something known. The night before the launch, there was a three-hour teleconference between rocket engineers at Thiokol, the manufacturer company of the solid rocket boosters, and NASA. In the teleconference it was discussed the effect on the O-rings performance of the low temperature forecasted for the launch, and eventually a launch decision was attained.

The Rogers Commission concluded:

“A careful analysis of the flight history of O-ring performance would have revealed the correlation of O-ring damage in low temperature.”

The purpose of this case study, inspired by Siddhartha, Fowlkes, and Hoadley (1989), is to quantify what was the influence of the temperature on the probability of having at least one incident related with the O-rings.