Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.

It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.

I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn't been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.

On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we'd never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.

Not sure we wouldn't still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there's a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we'd still have the 'old school' Republican party instead of the "I'm not a fascist, I swear!" Republican party.