"If Columbia's ET was indeed a legacy CFC-11 tank,
this EPA/PC issue may well be a red herring.
I suspect that fixing this involves embedding a
light Kevlar mesh in the foam, with a thread
pitch that ensures any popcorn stays below the
target "safe" size."
Agreed. They did improve shedding considerably on this tank. I expect post flight data to show Discovery to be the cleanest to return yet. Gene Kranz believes there has been great progress made. it is not unresaonble to expect a test flight or two to prove things out. Thats what test flights are for.
from the Jerry Pournelle web page: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view372.html
What ought to have been done with NASA's billion and a half was: (1) Hire a dozen smart people to design a condom for the Shuttle Tank. Peter Glaskowsky and I discussed this last night: surely the right material for the condom would be America's Cup sailcloth which isn't a cloth but a reinforced carbon fiber film, as light as anything made for its strength. Make a condom of that, encase the tank in epoxy and that condom, and foam chunks won't fall off. It might weigh a few hundred pounds, and so what? (2) use the remaining funds -- a billion at least -- to pay a bunch of small companies out there to work on SSTO, recoverable first stage rocket boosters, and air drop. Get each to build the best X project flying hardware they can build incorporating their approach for the $333 million each will get. Fly those ships. Observe the results and decide which concepts to encourage.
Now none of this is going to happen. NASA has no competence at much of anything, even at political manipulation, and doesn't have the confidence of the public, but it can still prevent large sums from going to real rivals. NASA will instead try to get any development money pipelined to the big aerospace outfits because NASA knows they aren't much real competition.
But we all know that NASA, having spent billions since the Columbia disaster without any visible return on that investment, isn't going to get us to space. Sometimes some NASA teams can still do things right. Sometimes. But no one can count on that any longer.