Then there’s the whole depressurization and hypoxia problem.
YouTube just threw this at me:
The Funniest Rocket Failure Ever
An attempt to test the Mercury-Redstone system that fails on multiple levels.
Actually, the actual technicians at Morton Thiokol did know, before the disaster, and strongly warned about this, but their company executives and NASA managers ignored their warnings. As the later investigation showed (despite efforts by them to prevent this coming to light).
Reminds me of that sequence in The Right Stuff where the lone science guy is pushing one button to launch the rockets and it fails numerous times, much to his chagrin.
One of my friends once launched a space rocket by pushing the button like he was supposed to, and then, when that didn’t work, by kicking the control panel.
The two SRBs each had parachutes in order to recover / analyze / partially reuse them. It seems the parachute system for each SRB weighed several metric tons - 3.5 tons for the parachutes alone. This for an empty SRB of 91 tons.
With an empty weight of 82 tons for the shuttle, and a payload of at most 24 tons, it seems that the equivalent of two of those recovery systems would have been plenty to give a survivable impact for the astronauts.
Whether that would have helped those aboard Challenger is of course an entirely different question.
But it certainly raises the question why NASA was willing to loose at least 7 tons of payload capacity to gey back their SRBs, but didn’t build an escape system for the shuttle.
He should have adjusted the rabbit ears.
Assuming there would have been twice as many launches (not likely), and the same takeoff accident rate (who knows), the escape system would have to work in only half the cases (i.e. once) to give the same overall launch survival rates.