A great post, especially since it seeks to get at the truth of something that has implications for future missions, at the risk of the OP's reputation.
This part is one of the more disturbing parts though, and a good reminder of why technical persons of all fields, whether rocket scientists or programmers, should not adopt a "Well, we worked hard and we're smart so I'm sure everything's fixed"
> What you probably don’t know is that a side note in a final briefing before Discovery’s flight pointed out that the large chunk of foam that brought down Columbia could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect. Hmm. After 26 months of work, nobody knew how to address that little statement. Of course we had fixed everything. What else could there be? What else could we do? We were exhausted with study, test, redesign. We decided to fly.
How is it that this mentality exists at NASA? Isn't it a matter of logic that if the foam was shown not to have been an installation defect, that the engineers have to keep looking for the actual cause? The OP just brushes over this but surely there was some kind of debate, like: "Well, the particular test claiming that the foam was NOT an installation defect was poorly conducted, and all our other measurements say that the installation is the likely cause, so moving on..."
I really hope there isn't some kind of "Oh fuck it, just ship it" mentality at NASA.
Despite all the "if it's not safe, say so" posters (e.g., http://www.dpvintageposters.com/cgi-local/detail.cgi?d=9203), the anonymous tip lines, and everything else, it's hard to stand up and say that something is not safe enough, or that this cause has not been fully nailed down. Because it's usually a qualitative thing, and careers and programs are at stake.
I was at a large auditorium at JSC (Houston) once. It's where the big pre-launch briefings are held. They had installed phone handsets all over the periphery and aisles of the room so that anyone could easily stop a briefing to ask a question. (I've never seen a capability quite like that in an auditorium.)
The room had (IIRC) around 200 seats. It's hard to be the guy who stands up and stops the briefing to ask the key question. Even though a lot of infrastructure has been created to make it possible.
It's more of a footnote problem. The critical details need to percolate up to public focus, and if that detail was only mentioned as a side note at the end, then that process is obviously failing. The scary bit is that the Challenger investigation showed this was a _huge_ issue, and apparently still existed many years later [1].
Granted, it's a terribly hard thing to fix, getting the right information to the right people with the right priority. But this shows how critical it is to do just that.
You have a stated problem "the foam that came off didn't come off because of the reasons we thought it did." Now you have no other ideas besides what you've already considered and tested for 26 months. What do you do? Possibly spend another 2 years investigating and find nothing? Or conclude that the risk is small enough to fly while being vigilant about the problem and looking for more data to lead you in the right direction?
Sometimes the only way to get more data to solve the problem is to do the very thing that causes it, while hoping that you've mitigated its effects well enough that the system is still safe.
I'm not saying that this isn't the case, I was hoping for more clarification. The way that the OP writes it is that this "side note" was included in the final briefing pointing out the flawed hypothesis.
The OP doesn't say how conclusive this "side note" was, or if it was one such note among many others. If it is the latter situation, then yes, it's understandable that it was seen as an acceptable blind spot.
But the situation, as the OP describes it, sounds pretty clear cut: The foam issues could come from poor installation procedures. But testing found that the defective foam "could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect"...
So I'm just interested in knowing the level of conclusiveness in that sidenote.
You might be interested in one of the comments from the blog page, and Hale's reply:
Sorry Wayne, it seems to me that you launched knowing there was an unresolved problem, not unlike the Challenger accident decision. What else could you do? Ground the vehicle until the problem is fixed!! The crews’ lives and the future of NASA was at stake.
This part is one of the more disturbing parts though, and a good reminder of why technical persons of all fields, whether rocket scientists or programmers, should not adopt a "Well, we worked hard and we're smart so I'm sure everything's fixed"
> What you probably don’t know is that a side note in a final briefing before Discovery’s flight pointed out that the large chunk of foam that brought down Columbia could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect. Hmm. After 26 months of work, nobody knew how to address that little statement. Of course we had fixed everything. What else could there be? What else could we do? We were exhausted with study, test, redesign. We decided to fly.
How is it that this mentality exists at NASA? Isn't it a matter of logic that if the foam was shown not to have been an installation defect, that the engineers have to keep looking for the actual cause? The OP just brushes over this but surely there was some kind of debate, like: "Well, the particular test claiming that the foam was NOT an installation defect was poorly conducted, and all our other measurements say that the installation is the likely cause, so moving on..."
I really hope there isn't some kind of "Oh fuck it, just ship it" mentality at NASA.