I should have given more than a one-line answer to the previous post, but you completely misunderstood what I was saying. The post to which I was referring said that it was incompetent to know of the problem of the insulating foam coming off the engines for five years and not to take any action to fix it. When I called refusal to address the problem "willful negligence," I was using the term as it is used in most of American industry. I work in the petrochemical industry, and if we knew of a potentially life-threatening situation and refused to address it for five years, we could be jailed for willful negligence if the situation resulted in someone's death.
I don't know whether NASA was trying to address the situation or not. If they were and simply hadn't found a good fix, then "willful negligence" does not apply. Maybe incompetence is an issue, but I am more inclined to believe it is just one of the problems with space travel. As I understand what has been said in this thread, the foam insulation falling from the booster is a problem that is about five years old and caused by the change from fluorocarbons to some other gas in the making of the insultation. Both my comments and the comments that preceded them need to be remembered in that light.
I still support the space program and understand that the thermal tiles are the best solution that we have so far to a difficult problem. As far as I know, we still can't be certain that Saturday's disaster was caused by tile failure anyway. I've done enough failure analysis to understand the need not to analyze ahead of the data. It's easy to blame things on a known weak link, but sometimes the real cause of failure was something entirely different.
I realize that space travel is different from the rest of American industry, but 17 losses in 40 years is not considered good outside of things like NASA and NASCAR. In the petrochemical industry, our risk analyses must show an expected death rate of less than one death in 10,000 years in order to accept a situation. We have accidents that no one expects and have a higher rate, but 17 in 40 years would be considered very bad.
WFTR
Bill