one ORIN HATCH!!! Senator from Utah.
Orin put a stop to the original NON-SEGMENTED SRB selected to be manufactured in New Jersey. It would be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center via the inter-coastal waterway down the eastern seaboard. NASA wanted a single SRB... no seems, no o-rings.
But Hatch, Senator from Utah, wanted Morten-Thiokol to get the contract to make the SRBs in Utah... where they would have to shipped by rail to Florida. That would require them to be in segments to fit on the flatbed rail cars. Thus the fundamental flaw of O-rings, etc. Sure, a lot of lower level engineers raised the alarm because on previous launches in colder temperatures they has already noticed significant "burn through" at the O-rings. The temps caused the O-rings to shrink a small amount, but as the SRB burns into the top segment the exhaust flames would ( under a lot of pressure ) start burning around the O-ring. The engineers had seen this from previous missions.
Richard Feynman was on the disaster review panel that highlighted this design flaw. He came to NASA Ames to give a lecture on this not long before he passed away.
from wikipedia:
Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife.[180] Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."[181]
During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water.[182] The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.[183]
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