[Atchafalaya]

My question also, was it foam or ice from the supercooled liquid fuel. I beleive the foam is a type of polyurethane; if that was a large chunk of ice then the damage may have been more significant. Speculation! I'm just so sad that this occurred. So close to home, but at the point of maximum stress and something let go. I remember Challenger, there was a Morton Thiokol engineer walking into the office and someone asked him what happened and he said that it was obvious that the shuttle fuel tank had failed and had blown up. Well as we all found out later it wasn't a fuel tank failure, it was a SRB joint/gasket failure that caused the incident. I'm sure the people at Michaud are devastated by this loss and are going over the records of that tank. When a catastrophe such as this occures a single quantifying reason is extremely rare. The expected scenario (if all tell the truth) is that there is a chain of events that lead up to the incident; that at if at any point that chain is intervened upon the incident doesn't occur. Let the chips fall where they may.

[XBob]

74 - "I remember Challenger, there was a Morton Thiokol engineer walking into the office and someone asked him what happened and he said that it was obvious that the shuttle fuel tank had failed and had blown up. Well as we all found out later it wasn't a fuel tank failure, it was a SRB joint/gasket failure that caused the incident. "

Yes, I remember too, and the only guy who was fired, in the whole incident was the Morton-Thiokol engineer who did tell the truth, and said 'don't fly', and not any of the others who lied, or over road him.

And they still haven't properly publicized that they had been aware of the o-ring problem for years prior to the incident, and had the fix design completed for 18 months, but they just couldn't slow the schedule down to fix the problem.