Many had promised, but George W. Bush actually outlined the first real mission for the agency after promises made by Ronald Reagan, his father, and Bill Clinton lacked the vision or knowledge to follow through on their vision.
Sadly, it is the story of every new traffic light. Often we pay with our dearest blood to shake out a new public consensus.
It took Columbia to finally admit that the Shuttle was never more than an experimental system, from which we learned a great deal, not the least of which the merits of expendable boosters.
Congress also shares some of the blame, as does our complacient and proserous culture who did not make them accountable nor listened to the sober voices who called for many of the exact changes recently codified by the President.
Whether or not Dittemore embodies everyone's idea of a rigid bureaucracy, failure is at the heart of good science - the final uncovering of an orthodoxy that had fallen prey to the what usually happens to all orthodoxy-the inevitable creep from its mission to a mission of self-continutity.
It's an old story.
While so many of us remember Ron Dittemore's incredulity at facing the possibilty that a suitcase of politically correct insulation material had breeched an airframe subject to more scrutiny and real-world testing than any flying machine in our history, I also remember his openness and patience, without condecension, in those press conferences immediately after the disaster.
As a good engineer and scientist, no matter how disbelieving, he accepted the cause and discarded all the other possibilities that lead to the death of close friends whose lives he accepted as his responsibility.
Kepler was as wedded to his perfect spheres being the orbits of the planets, but with Tycho's data and the obvious failure of Ptolemy's Cosmos to match observations, he too cast aside long-defended beliefs and came up with a model for the orbits of the Planets that more closely matched reality.
As a long proponent of change in the NASA culture and that Agency's focus, very similar to the CAIB's eventual conclusions, I have to thank Ron Dittemore for his ability to help a shocked and angry public come to grips the the emotional overload of those first weeks after Feb. 1, 2003.
If for no other reason, I salute him for helping me and my family cope in those first horrible days.
I don't remember him for being rigid is his disbelief at the shedding foam being the cause. I remember him for being a voice of reason at a time when that voice was called for.
Ron - if you're out there, thank you. It wasn't your fault. It was always an experimental enterprise that politicians insisted must become something other than what it had been demonstrated to be time and again.
You did a good job, especially in the aftermath, and science, to be science, must collide with the truth in order to be true to its method.
You shared your personal and professional grief with us, and your nation owes you a huge debt for taking more than your share of the responsibility.
If I were the person who had to deliver that news to the families and listen to those screams, I'd probably still be in therapy or would have gone home and put a shotgun in my mouth. Probably the worst job on the planet to have on that particular day.