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147 - "Do you know anything about the formula of the insulation foam being changed?"

Not really. I do know that the external tank foam was like high density, polyurethan, pretty hard (compared to the white foam on the shuttle), and seems to 'skim' over on drying, so that it remains relatively water proof. I remember some hail damage patches, and also some 'bird' damage. we had some birds which decided they wanted to peck some holes in the insulation, and they needed to be driven off and the holes patched. I don't remember what the solutions were to either problem, But I do remember patches.

All that work was out on the pads (about 10 miles away), where I rarely went.

Kennedy Space Center is a wild life refuge, and there are all kinds of 'greenies' guarding the 'wild life'. They routinely tried to shut down launches in the 80's. And they forced terrifffffic extra expenses. (Like catching each grain of sand and paint when sand blasting the rust on steel gantries on the edge of the ocean, and packing it all up in 55 gallon drums and trucking it as hazardous material for burial in Alabama). Catching rats, which would routinely eat the communication cable insululation, in glue traps, and then analyzing each rat to see if was one of the 'endangered' rats, before killing it. Not allowing us to return any of the daily/weekly/monthly water quality test samples from local water systems (ponds, canals, etc) back to the place we got them from , even if they were not contaminated, or even dump them into sewage disposal system. (so we built a 10,000 gallon tank, where we stored them, for years - they probably still haven't figured out what to do with them - and that is 14 years ago). Not being allowed to put any water from our drinking water (contained chlorine) system on the ground , so we had to make special disposal.

I remember how they dictated that we couldn't drinking water for the heat supression system (500,000 gallons of water pumped out in 15 seconds to cool the gantry to keep the rocket blast from melting them), we had to use 'natural' water. So jillions snails got into the (nice warm, dark, wet) giant tanks system, clogged up our gigantic tanks and pumps. It took months to fix them. Then we had to build a special plant to process 'natural water' to keep 'natural' things out of the 'natural' water.