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"Boisjoly could not watch the launch, so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up."

One thing is to believe that the chance of blowing up is ~1% (which is enough to prevent launch).

Another thing is to be certain, that it WILL blow up (I assume 90%+ probability here).

If he was so certain, why he could not convince his management?

It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the following report and Feynman's findings. Anonymous polling of engineers showed they estimated a general probability of catastrophic disaster in a shuttle launch between 1% and 2%.

So latimes.com's article blew it out of proportions. 2% chance of disaster is not nearly the same as "so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up."

You're conflating two different estimates: Boisjoly was certain that the particular launch would fail, and a survey of engineers gave a 1-2% estimate for failure across all flights.

Both of those predictions turned out to be extraordinarily accurate.

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