Where did it go?

Wormhole

Yeah, they because they definitely intended to blow up $500 million, 6 astronauts, and 1 civilian in a fireball, just because it would look cool.

Idiot.

>they definitely intended to blow up $500 million, 6 astronauts, and 1 civilian in a fireball, just because it would look cool.

If they didn't, wouldn't they have listened to the engineers telling them not to do it?

It wasn't intentional, but it was gross negligence.
Is the negligent party not at fault? This was avoidable.

They could have:
A) Cancelled the entire flight, thereby wasting millions of tax payer dollars and have to delay the flight once again
or
B) Take the (what they believed to be marginal) risk of the cold temperature having messed with something

I don't think you realize that NASA is a political organization and is therefore subject to political pressure. It doesn't look good when you constantly postpone things and waste money. I'm not saying that makes it right, I'm just saying that they launched because it would have meant wasting more money if they postponed it any further.

And there's a big difference between murder and negligence.

NASA has an obligation no to do things if they can't do them safely.
They failed that obligation.

>"Hey, should we land people on the Moon?"
>"No, what if a micrometeorite hit the vehicle? It would be a disaster, people might die."
>"Alright senpai good point, let's just send stupid robots to go do dumb shit no one cares about"

The future belongs to the brave, it always has. Pussies like you can sit here and die in the dirt.

You still need to intelligently weight risks.
The people in charge of the Shuttle didn't do that, they denied the risks.

Yes, marginal risks. Look, hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to sit here and criticize NASA for allowing the shuttle launch to go through, but you have to look at it from their perspective. The only thing the engineers told them was that the cold may have contracted a few parts, and that they wouldn't know until they got in there and inspected everything. That's easy for the engineers to say, because it isn't their ass on the line if they have to delay the launch by weeks or months so a proper inspection can be done. It was a calculated risk, exploration, especially space exploration, is full of those. Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don't. People tend to focus on and criticize only the few times that they don't.

I'm not saying NASA doesn't have any blame here, they do. But demonizing them is pointless and, quite frankly, offensive. These people are our modern day equivalents of Magellan and Columbus. They're the ones taking humanity by the hand and showing us new places, no matter how much the serfs would prefer to sit on their turf.

I really don't think anyone could have said it better than Reagan when he addressed the nation following the disaster. The future belongs to the brave. There will be losses along the way, nothing can prevent that. It's pointless to sit here and point fingers after the fact. The only thing that matters is that we learned from it and that future explorers will have that tiny added bit of wisdom to build on.

The launch was very much intentional.

Intentional against the direct warnings of the engineers. In any other case this would be considered cold blooded murder.