I think he told me they fired foam at a mockup of the door at the same time (about a year ago, wasn't it?) they did the tests of the leading edge.
He also told me that I was wrong on the "artificial" nature of the leading edge tests. From the photos posted here, it looked to me like the leading edge was supported both inside and outside with little glued on struts.
He told me, no, the leading edge test section was mounted just as it would have been on an orbiter, using actual flight hardware.
Apparently, those struts I saw were behind the wing in the photo, not on it.
I appreciate your comments and your informed opinions are valuable to this thread.
Someday perhaps we might all meet for coffee and compare stories.
The recovery effort is, IMHO, stalled.
While the engineers are working to correct substantial problems, there is NO WAY recover the economics of the early STS program.
Because we've lost two orbiters, the cost of maintaining the vehicles is growing instead of diminishing and the economics of the manned flight systems we currently fly are going to increase instead of decrease.
I don't know about you, but I am beginning to think that the only way to get humans to orbit at $100 per lb. is to build vehicles that can orbit payloads at that cost.
It appears that not even Rutan's Spaceship One (a suborbital vehicle) can achieve that cost ratio...
bummer ain't it?