[jpthomas]

A tidbit for all the "foamologists" out there.

[Banjoguy]

..maybe it's fortuitious that NASA wasn't more closely involved in the investigation. We may eventually get to the truth about this.

[Born to Conserve]

The hole wouldn't have been visable to spy satallites, but what about a friggin camara? They could have floated a video camera out the payload bay, turned the shuttle and waited for the camera to wobble in the right direction.

If the hole had been discovered early in the mission, they could have arrainged for rescue missions to take astronauts back in other vihicals, or at least jettisened the payload, which was the heaviest the shuttle had ever returned to earth.

The administrators should be put up on charges for their negligence.

[Conspiracy Guy]

We will never get the straight skinny on this. NASA screwed up big time. Arrogance and negligence.

[fooman]

Who ever poo poo ed the foamologists at NASA should admit that he is an idiot or resign.

[Jesse]

NASA figured this out a long time ago. This is the bureaucratic response to foulups...delay the bad news as long as possible.

Even armchair physicists like me found it quite plausible that a piece of broken off foam traveling at a high relative velocity to the wing when it hit could concentrate a lot of force on tiles which have been shown on countless television documentaries to be very resistant to heat, but very delicate when subjected to mechanical forces.

I think that the engineers screwed up early on and did not calculate the forces, they just thought that foam was not enough to hurt the shuttle...like a nerf ball. What they forgot was the high relative velocity the foam achieved in the airstream within a few feet precisely because it was not very dense.

[TheDon]

"But they say even a 10-inch-by-10-inch hole probably would not have been visible to spy satellites."

A 10 by 10 inch hole would have been quite clearly visible from a satellite based telescope. There was an amazingly clear photo of the shuttle from an earth based telescope.

[bribriagain]

fyi

[tm22721]

Could-a

Would-a

Shoud-a

BUMP