NASA knew of insulation threat before Columbia

Houston chronicle ^

[isthisnickcool]

NASA recognized last year that insulation flying off the space shuttle's external fuel tank could pose a hazard, but improvements developed by engineers were not made before Columbia went on its doomed mission....

[davisfh]

"..improvements developed by engineers were not made before Columbia went on its doomed mission...."

Making improvements would mean stripping foam from tanks already in the inventory. That's doable but perhaps that's why they chose not to and, if the foam actually did cause the accident, it was a fatal error.

In any case, it would have been a NASA decision since they are "owned" by NASA once they are bought off at the Michoud Assembly Facility. And, of course, NASA would have had to compensate their contractor for the work. Tight budget,. . . etc., etc.

[Nephi]

Well, now we know why NASA has been floating the meteor, space junk, alien theories.

[TLBSHOW]

ping

doomed from the start

[TLBSHOW]

http://www.nasaproblems.com/

[isthisnickcool]

The chronicle is a few days late on this story. I posted something about it here and other places. But with the wrong mission number. I did not know the missions were not sequential. So I thought it was STS-105 but it was actually STS-112. I was corrected by Cboltd here. After being corrected my next posts were basically like like this one.

[fooman]

thnaks for the bump