Two days in a row of these sucks. And there's one more anniversary on Saturday. On January 28, 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up 73 seconds into its flight. This is just not a good week in the history of the U.S. space program.
The Challenger disaster was the main subject of my engineering ethics class. The circumstances that led to the loss of Challenger is a cautionary tale of external pressure overriding engineering judgment. If you're not familiar with what happened, I encourage you to read up on it or at least see the recent TV movie with William Hurt as Richard Feynman.