Columbia news about to break?

A good Washington source says that there will be "explosive" news on Friday about the space shuttle Columbia. NASA is said to be bracing.

i did NOT say that we needed to abandon the space program. you said that.

i did say that nasa needs new management.

any u.s. corporation suffering comparable losses would have already replaced the management. but, government is somehow perceived differently.

if you think about it, all i'm saying is the obvious and the conservative viewpoint.

Ill agree with your comment about management, but we dont even know what really happened. What if it all was a terrible accident? No ones fault, just a horrible tragedy, would a management change still be neccessary? I worked for a long time in Greeneblt MD, which is where Goddard Space Flight Center is located. I have known people from the Technical Publications dept, all the way up to Senior Management. Everyone I knew was hard working, dedicated to their mission and fully aware of who pays their salaries. It is because of these people I knew, and I knew a lot of them, that I think NASA bashing sucks. Thats just my opinion...

i don't think it's nasa bashing.

and, it's obvious on this forum when people work for various concerns, such as microsoft, etc. they don't want their company that they work for, or their relatives work for, or their state criticized.

there have been two losses.

the management at the top seems entrenched.

we taxpayers deserve better.

to say this does not put the hard-working people throughout the organization in a bad light.

i lived in greenbelt, md and alexandria, va while working for a "beltway bandit" company. i've seen real cheats both inside and outside of government. there are high level government officials that move in and out of government and business, reaping large salaries.

the fact of the matter is, ALL organizations even those once successful, lose their magic. they need a shake up from time to time.

i first learned this when i was working as a staff member after college at a state university. there was a change at the top, and the new top official brought in new middle management. was i angry! i wanted my little world to stay the way it was.

after the changes and after a new chemistry among the employees developed, it was obvious to me that we had a lean, mean organization that out performed the old.

change can be good.

72 - "Due to budget cuts there is not a set of main engines for each orbiter. The main engines must be moved from the bird that just landed to the one that is being prepared for flight."

I don't know about their current status, however, I do know that most of the spare parts left were used to build the last shuttle. I also know that we were (me specifically) regularly required to 'canabalize', beg, borrow and steal parts from various orbiters to fly the current bird. We tried very hard to avoid this, if possible, as it cost at least 3 times as much labor and 5 times as much paperwork to pull (canabilize) parts.

Main engines were/are built by Rocketdyne - Canoga Park, California, apparently aquired by Boeing in 1996. I do not know if they are still being manufactured.

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