"blow it up" was an example of a thing that "could not make sense" for rocket science as a quote. I also did not know (and currently do not know) of significant rocket explosions or failures that didn't result in the loss of human life, sadly.
Looking at the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... I'm guessing Soyuz 33, STS-1 and a few others would have worked, but any of those would have brought back similar images, whether the space shuttle image was of a complete one or from the challenger explosion, a failure in rocket science reminds you of any of those you have seen; car crashes and airplane crashes are likely the same.
Then again, it's possible the whole slide is in bad taste. I wanted to convey what the 'let it crash' stuff felt to me the first time I heard it, and Challenger's disaster felt both higher profile and more distant in our collective memory than any random disasters I could have used.
I could probably have avoided discussing the topic entirely, but I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it. It possibly failed.
> I wanted to convey what the 'let it crash' stuff felt to me the first time I heard it, and Challenger's disaster felt both higher profile and more distant in our collective memory than any random disasters I could have used.
This was a good choice.
> ...I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it.
Given enough people, someone will inevitably take offense to anything you write. If someone is insufficiently capable of considering the context in which a reminder of a thirty-year-old high-profile disaster [0] is presented, they're gonna be unreasonably kerfluffled.
[0] A disaster that was caused by a serious failure to remember and stay within the safety margins of a very complex and hazardous system... which makes the choice of this particular disaster even more apt.
Looking at the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... I'm guessing Soyuz 33, STS-1 and a few others would have worked, but any of those would have brought back similar images, whether the space shuttle image was of a complete one or from the challenger explosion, a failure in rocket science reminds you of any of those you have seen; car crashes and airplane crashes are likely the same.
Then again, it's possible the whole slide is in bad taste. I wanted to convey what the 'let it crash' stuff felt to me the first time I heard it, and Challenger's disaster felt both higher profile and more distant in our collective memory than any random disasters I could have used.
I could probably have avoided discussing the topic entirely, but I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it. It possibly failed.