According to what I heard on Fox News, this is not a rare event. It has happend nine times before without incident.
Sounds like the 'Group think of Challenger'
So we arrive at a 10% failure rate. Not odds I'd trust my life to.
Yeah, I heard the guy at the press conference talk about some of the previous incidents. I wasn't impressed, imo, it wasn't an excuse for not doing a visual check.
I used to launch planes off of aircraft carriers. Not that that equates to a shuttle launch.
The concept of being responsible for the lives of others is the same though.
It was my responsibility to ensure that the catapult that was going to launch the pilot and/or aircrew that our machinery was working. If we screwed up, there was a chance someone was going to die or you lose or damage costly equipment.
I'd never in good conscience not check for damage if something abnormal had occurred, even if previous events had turned up negative or were deemed non-critical.
Imo, it sounds as if they, (mission control) fell into the "cry wolf" syndrone. After X previous impacts why check anything?
I heard the guy say that they had ran different analyses which sounds great but doesn't compare to doing a look see.
Perhaps the wing was fine as projected by the analyses and the shuttle failed due to some other factor, but, since mission control failed to look, perhaps we'll never know.