I listened carefully to the NASA report yesterday afternoon. Most questions were fine with only a few reporters repeating questions--which is beyond my understanding.
However, no one asked how soon after take-off could the shuttle safely abort a mission. One of the NASA representatives, Ron Dittemore, indicated over and over that a tile lost before or during re-entry would cause certain devastation of the vehicle, although damaged tiles, not lost ones, at least on the underside, would not cause a crash. He clearly stated that NASA's charge was to insure that tiles would not come off. And he also said that the piece of insulation foam that had come off during take-off had hit the left wing where the problems began to be noticed upon re-entry at 7:53 Central Time, but that NASA would not jump to conclusions about the relationship between the foam and the left wing. Many factors will have to be scrutinized.
Why was there something as apparently flimsy as foam on the outside of the craft? Foam wouldn't be a very stable material in the first place given the great thrust and resistence of take-off. Would it? Still, it seems incomprehensible that a piece of foam hitting tile would have caused the tile to come loose. And that's pretty much what the engineers determined and agreed upon after take-off. They agreed that the foam would not affect the stability of the tile. Still, it hit the left wing and that's where the sensors began to stop working.
One other thing I've heard that is disturbing, but I don't know whether this is true since it didn't come out of NASA or from a realiable source. I heard that there is a 1 in 25 chance that a shuttle will not make it. Has anyone else heard this figure. I'm hoping that this figure is incorrect.
Edit: That one in twenty-five must be incorrect. We've had Challenger and now Columbia. How many other shuttles have not made it somehow in some way?
