Watching this film for the first time in many years, I couldn't help but notice the similarity to the Challenger disaster in 1986. More than a dozen Morton Thiokol engineers tried to stop the launch of the doomed space shuttle. Sadly, unlike Jimmy Stewart they couldn't get in the cockpit and wreck the vehicle. Later on it was discovered that the temperature caused the flaw in the design to reveal itself just as it did in this movie.
shareThat's real life for you. Moreover, even if they had access to the spacecraft, what makes you think they would have had the guts to disable it? Why, today, post 9-11, they'd be branded as wild-eyed terrorists.
shareThat was rubber gasket shrinkage caused by cold temps. Not nuclear fusion causing crystallizing of the metal structure......
Seems too trivial a thing to have happened to a spacecraft. I thought they were overdesigned to a point to make them safer (redundancy). Guess they weren't.
Always better to send the engineers (and MANAGERS) up in test flights first.
Never happens.