Completely and utterly insane.
Instead, NASA made the change as part of an ongoing bid to meet U.S. and international environmental bans dating to the 1990s.
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Agreed that this was political insanity. The impact of such panderinging to the enviro-whacko movement was obvious -- it cost lives. The foam issue most likely would not have happened if the recipe had not been changed. At least to the extent we saw in the first missions which went very well.
This does not say that the foam does not age, with usage but the change was still a massive technical error and any change by NASA should have been completely qualified before it was flown.