The Predicted Disaster

Maaz Ahmad
Write A Catalyst
Published in
8 min readSep 7, 2024

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Based on True Incident.

Image from The Guardian

Inspired by the Documentary : Challenger: The Final Flight.

This is just a summary of the incident which I wrote after watching the documentary and reading the Technical reports of the Incident.

As an engineer I tried to understand what went wrong and its an effort to put it in a way that anyone can understand.

Sometimes in the admiration of a gigantic human marvel we forget to recognize the important role played by every single miniscule part helping that structure to look that way.

Introductory lines:

This story is not just about one lesson and go away in the very singularity of our minds it about lessons and I use the plural intentionally as this is a testimony of human pride, irrational rigidity leading to a catastrophe far more deadly than one could fathom. How engineering yet out savior and bringing us ease in all our difficulties can cause fatal accidents if ignored.

Preface

Before going into details about what caused this failure I would just like to expand on that how I came across this tragedy. I was scrolling down Facebook as usual and I came across a paragraph (the reason of me having Facebook is reading those

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Maaz Ahmad
Write A Catalyst

Engineer in the Morning Writer at Night. Never underestimate the power of words.