From John (john2375):

Not -107.

Well OBviously - since there was nothing wrong with the final launch
countdown what-so-ever.

Nothing wrong? ET foam impact has been taken as an "acceptable risk"
from the very beginning of the program. One of those Russian Roulette
bullets turns out to be a foam bullet. Here's a link to the CAIB
report if you want to have a closer look at what they had to say:

http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

From p127 of CAIBvI, section 6.1 A HISTORY OF FOAM ANOMALIES:
________

One debris strike in particular foreshadows the STS-107 event. When
Atlantis was launched on STS-27R on De-cember 2, 1988, the largest
debris event up to that time significantly damaged the Orbiter.
....
Mission Commander R.L. "Hoot" Gibson later stated that Atlantis
"looked like it had been blasted by a shotgun."18 Concerned that the
Orbiter's Thermal Protection System had been breached, Gibson or-dered
that the video be transferred to Mission Control so that NASA
engineers could evaluate the damage.
....
Damage was concentrated outboard of a line right of the bipod
attachment to the liquid oxygen umbilical line. Even more worrisome,
the debris had knocked off a tile, ex-posing the Orbiter's skin to the
heat of re-entry. Post-flight analysis concluded that structural
damage was confined to the exposed cavity left by the missing tile,
which happened to be at the location of a thick aluminum plate
covering an L-band navigation antenna. Were it not for the thick
alumi-num plate, Gibson stated during a presentation to the Board that
a burn-through may have occurred.
_______




More from p122:
________

Discussion of Foam Strikes
Prior to the Rogers Commission

Foam strikes were a topic of management concern at the time of the
Challenger accident. In fact, during the Rog-ers Commission accident
investigation, Shuttle Program Manager Arnold Aldrich cited a
contractor's concerns about foam shedding to illustrate how well the
Shuttle Program manages risk:

On a series of four or five external tanks, the thermal insulation
around the inner tank … had large divots of insulation coming off and
impacting the Orbiter. We found significant amount of damage to one
Orbiter after a flight and … on the subsequent flight we had a camera
in the equivalent of the wheel well, which took a picture of the tank
after separation, and we determined that this was in fact the cause of
the damage. At that time, we wanted to be able to proceed with the
launch program if it was acceptable … so we undertook discus-sions of
what would be acceptable in terms of potential field repairs, and
during those discussions, Rockwell was very conservative because,
rightly, damage to the Orbiter TPS [Thermal Protection System] is
damage to the Orbiter system, and it has a very stringent environ-ment
to experience during the re-entry phase.

Aldrich described the pieces of foam as "… half a foot square or a
foot by half a foot, and some of them much smaller and localized to a
specific area, but fairly high up on the tank. So they had a good shot
at the Orbiter underbelly, and this is where we had the damage."
_________



....and Columbia's "nail in the coffin", so to speak, is found on p125:
_________

STS-113 Flight Readiness Review: A Pivotal Decision
....
The Board wondered why NASA would treat the STS-112 foam loss
differently than all others. What drove managers to reject the
recommendation that the foam loss be deemed an In-Flight Anomaly? Why
did they take the unprecedented step of scheduling not one but
eventually two missions to fly before the External Tank Project was to
report back on foam losses?
....
_________



Take this foam impact history and reconsider the original quote at the
top of this thread:

"The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

....and see how much glowing praise you want to give the astronaut
corps.

Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.


I fully expect that there were astronauts who protested such backward
priorities. But they clearly failed to protest *enough*. This was
the same failure of Roger Boisjoly. And we have 14 dead astronauts as
a result.


....so let's give them prizes and awards and move on. That's just
peachy.

When the astronaut office gets absolved from culpability in -51L and
-107, then they learn that they don't have to be accountable for these
mistakes.

....unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.






I just now had the strange thought that "WLEs" can be pronounced
"willies". How horribly sad.


~ CT