The blogger known as Dr. Sanity was the flight surgeon for the final Challenger mission [and yes, I have met her professionally and is who she says she is]. She has writen some on the accident.
It's interesting, because through my college connections I have a slightly different view of things, at least now. Denial may have been a problem with Challenger, but now every astronaut at least knows that the flight could end in their death. I can't say for certain about their families, but I suspect the same.
Some other thoughts: (1)apparently, doing engineering time-to-failure kinds of studies, you can expect a catastrophic failure of the space shuttle one out of every thirty launches. (2) NASA is a huge bureaucratic nightmare. It is possible to build a safer launch vehicle, with the ability to scrub the mission even after the rockets have fired, using today's tech. But we'll keep doing shuttle launches, when the shuttle is essentially designed to do a bunch of different things, none of them well.
If someone wants proof, I know the consultants to hire.
Via Dean's World.