"Charles Angelich" wrote to "Matt Mc_carthy" (07 Jul 03
 16:05:00)
 --- on the topic of "Shuttle Columbia Tests"

 CA> Reminds me of the opening scenes to the movie "Brazil" by Terry
 CA> Gilliam. A fly jams a government computer which causes them to
 CA> arrest the wrong man. In the movie this is 'dark humor', with
 CA> NASA I think foam is also dark humor.

 CA> The same scenario repeats over and over again that employees
 CA> warned superiors and were ignored. Not just the three that were
 CA> recently moved to other jobs but it seems that ignoring
 CA> underlings is the defacto standard operational procedure at
 CA> NASA. In my world we call this arrogance and incompetence.

Bureaucratic bungling like mixing up metric with Imperial measures and
losing the Mars Observer. The problem with career bureaucrats is they
tend to get promoted in spite of incompetance just to get them out of a
department that can't stand them any longer.

I just reviewed the slow motion tapes of the foam hitting the wing
incident and it finally struck me that a along there was an
inconsistency in what we were all looking at in the replays. If you
observe carefully we see a piece of foam hit the leading edge AND top of
the wing but something very crucial occurs, we see a spray of debris on
the underside but NOT across the top surface of the wing.

The answer is clear: the foam went through the top and out the bottom.

Today the Columbia Investigation Board released test results which show
spectacular damage with a 700 kph piece of foam to the "TOP" of the wing
and it confirms what I now finally see is missing in the event's replay.

 Mike
 ****

... To iterate is human;  to recurse, divine.
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30