It was one such piece of foam that hit the wing leading edge on Columbia and broke a hole in the RCC (Reinforced Carbon-Carbon). That led to losing the second Shuttle.
Are you referring to the heat shield tiles needed for the craft to survive the intense heat of reentry? Columbia exploded on reentry, didn't it?
Livestock fed...
No, I am talking about the insulating foam on the ET. The cryogenic liquids inside freeze atmospheric moisture on and within the foam. The adhesive is to keep it attached to the ET on ascent. The foam gets pretty heavy in spots from ice build up and that was always recognized as a risk.
The tile adhesive also may have been replaced by an inferior product, but I don’t recall the details of that story.
Columbia officially crashed because a piece of ice-laden foam peeled off the ET and hit the leading edge. The part that the public does not know about is what I mentioned about the RCC.
The leading edge of the Shuttle wing is RCC. At the point where the nose shock wave impinges on that leading edge, there are very high heating rates.
Rockwell’s Lab and Test found that the RCC was “de-densifying” at that point. The high heating rates were causing oxygen to migrate into the RCC and it outgassed CO.
The problem was most severe on Columbia because it was the oldest Shuttle and had spent the most time on the pad. The salt from the KSC environment was catalyzing the C-O reaction.
They catscanned the RCC and later found you could poke your finger through it because it had become so weak!
Like I said, I left the program before I found out if they followed our recommendations. However, in that first meeting at JSC we were told that there was no money in the budget to replace the leading edge on Columbia.