"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

The PAL ramp shedding on Discovery has recently been shown to have been
the result of expansion and contraction of the ET during fueling causing
the foam to de-bond from the tank, and not damage during construction as
originally thought, so the problem seems to be a basic engineering flaw in
the ET's design- and not a decay of the safety culture.


Pat, the actual cause of the shedding isn't a decay of NASA's safety
culture...but how they have addressed it and dealt with it *is*.