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What about the pics in comment# 1? Do they cause any grief?

Relatively speaking, a minor amount.

Most of the news portals are so graphic intensive anymore that it can (quite literally, I'm not kidding) take several minutes to download a story.

The beauty of the printer friendly version is that it has few, if any, graphics and downloads very quickly.

A pet peeve: news organizations that take a story and spread it over several pages so they can torture you with a new set of graphical ads on each page. Grrr!

The local newspaper recently redid their web site. There are now so many graphics and ads in Flash movie format that the site has become unusable for me. It takes, again, I'm not kidding, over FIVE minutes for the home page to load. And I have a "fast" dialup connection of 50.2 Kbps.

Sorry for the rant. Thanks for asking about the pix.

"What about the pics in comment# 1? Do they cause any grief?"

I can comment on the Shuttle picture since I was working at JSC (for Lockheed) at the time.

When they shipped the Orbiter to the Cape, they did not have all of the flight tiles finished yet. Those were to be added at KSC. There were concerns about the aerodynamics of the Orbiter atop the 747 transport if they flew without a full set of tiles, so temporary tiles (without the thermal protection capability) were added. Because they were to be removed at the Cape, they were stuck on with a temporary glue. (I believe it was water soluble).

The 747 went through a rainstorm en route, and when it stopped to refuel (I believe at San Antonio) it was discovered that a lot of the temporary tiles had fallen off. In engineering terms it was no biggie, because these tiles were supposed to be removed, and the Orbiter/747 system flew just as well without the tiles as with. (In plain English, they did not need to add the temporary tiles.)

Some media whores took pictures of the vehicle, and spread it across the airways as an example of NASA incompetence. NASA management then panicked, and ordered the temporary tiles replaced with permanent glue, so as to stop the press criticism. It was done, the new tiles did not fall off over the rest of the trip.

Unfortunately, they also did not come off in the processing facility. They had to be chipped off. It took a lot longer, and some of the flight tiles were damaged while trying to remove the temporaries -- requiring replacement in turn, further delaying things.

So the REAL problem was not due to the engineering decisions. They made the right call. Stick on temporary tiles with temporary glue. Don't worry if they fall off. On the other hand, management decisions managed to screw up the processing schedule big time. And why? To keep the press from playing gotcha games, which is all this article is anyway.