Read The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it’s always a perfect storm because of the variation of Murphy’s Law that’s usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right.
Oh 100%. Columbia was an organizational failure but it wasn't any one person/org's negligence like Challenger was nor was it a gross disregard/disrespect of the lives of the astronauts/cosmonauts like Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were.
My comment was mainly to address the suggestion that those disasters were equivalent to the gross disregard for life that the USSR put their cosmonauts through.
