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The locals were saying that the foam caused the "event" the morning it happened. There was also a rumor that the crew could see the damage from the flight deck and that the skipper emailed his wife about it. And that after the "event" she asked NASA about it.

Shortly after NASA sent a group of suits to one of the trainers in Houston to verify that the damaged area could be seen from various places in the orbiter. They concluded there was no way to see the damage. People that were there threw fits over this because it was obvious to them that it would have been possible to see the damage on the wing. This all happened the same week that the support contracts were being awarded. So many people kept their mouths tight while all this was happening. After the contracts were awarded a lot of people were shuffled around and out. The word is that many experienced folks were shown the door for younger (IE: cheaper to pay) people. Others were "retired".

This is all heresay from taggers I know. I can't verify any of it. But these same folks told me right after the "event" that the foam caused it. And they also said "Dittmore is toast". They were right.

As someone who likes to take advantage of the occational sucker bet, it was easy to become a foamista due to the long odds againt it being anything else.

There is a lot than can go wrong on a shuttle, and the chances something else would go wrong in the identical location with the identical results are a lot more astronomical than you can get to from low Earth orbit.

Please see how our thread developed. I posted a thread on this issue on February 3rd, 2003.

It has taken NASA a half year to complete the process we suggested in the first 48 hours of the disaster.

Not to crow too much, but if you review the threads created contemporaneously to the events; I was the first to note that the crew was lost.

This entire disaster was clearly related to the TPS. The only issue was to find the cause of the TPS failure. Every engineer on the shuttle program knows what a TPS failure mode looks like and it is precisely the type of pattern seen on reentry of the ill-fated Columbia flight.

The new NASA engineers are too young to know why the design limits are in place. Many probably were not even born when the program was conceived.

This thread http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/835531/posts proves my point.