Quote:
Your account of what happened is woefully inadequate. The people who 'saw' the foam hit the orbiter did everything they could to get the damage inspected. It was the management that was the roadblock. Grouping everybody that was involved under the 'NASA guys' label is an unfair characterization of people that did their damnest to bring their collegues and friends back home safely.

I agree, I have indeed not been fair. In NASA "rank and file" the original spirit probably still lives (as it did in Challenger times, when many engineers fought in vain gainst "well, it worked so far" attitude towards inadequate SRB design).

Quote:
The major difference is political attitudes and budget. Apollo era didn't have nearly the pressure (from a budget standpoint) that they do today. That was one of the reasons the requests were denied. In retrospect, I'm sure every manager involved wishes they could redo what happened. The problem was, the data available and past experience did not conclusively point to a total vehicle loss. The management made a decision (a very wrong one) that they were forced to based on those boundary conditions.

How conclusive must data pointing to a total vehicle loss be before heads are pulled from the sand? This is a replay of Challenger case - it was well known that O-rings were being partially burned through on virtually every flight, and some bogus statistics was being used as excuse for doing nothing. Budgetary constraints? How much loss of vehicle and two years of fleet grounding cost compared to fixing an obvious problem? And now, they are overcautious over every detail, but the problem that brought Columbia down is still there...

After Columbia accident one of the program managers (the one who conducted first press conferences, I forgot the name and position) more or less admitted that they were not looking very closely into leading edge RCC damage, because even if they found it, there was nothing they could do. Quite a defetist thinking...
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos Q#5196 MkII #080000376, 18GB green MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue